CAIRO: Twenty-eight information technology companies joined forces to establish the Information Technology Export Community (ITEC), a civil society with a goal to increase the companies' capacity to export products, attract foreign investment and make use of Egypt workforce. Mohamed Reda, chairman of ITEC, told Daily News Egypt that the society has already submitted its documents to the Ministry of Social Solidarity, which is expected to grant the society official status soon. ITEC will include companies such as ACT, Nest, IT Works, Arabize, AITS, DNS and MSN, he said, with a board comprising of officials from the government and representatives from foreign companies. Egypt's potential is greater that the amount of work it currently absorbs, he said. To this end, ITEC will work to obtain the international permits required for different fields, train workers, attract investments, organize missions abroad, launch awareness campaigns, coordinate with related institutions, and enhance product quality. ITEC will set out to create thousands of job opportunities in the near future, Reda said, and it will build residential and work areas for workers, much bigger than Smart Village. Reda, who is also the chairman of Allied Soft, criticized the fact that countries such as India and Pakistan outpaced Egypt in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) even though Egypt has more skilled labor and can employ thousands of young graduates in the business. His company digitizes documents for Egypt s National Document Authority, and has the capacity to finish around one million documents per month in the first phase, he explained. Egyptian companies currently work in digitizing medical transcriptions, coding and billing. They apply 99 percent of the standards set by the American Association of Medical Transcription, he said.
