By Balarabe Oshiafi
In furtherance of it’s policy of helping ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to embrace the culture of digitalisation, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has charged the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) to befriend technology as a way of arresting corruption.
Expressday learnt in a release that the Director General of NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi gave this counselling to ICPC Chairman, Dr Musa Adamu Aliyu, SAN and some of his staff when they visited him in his office in Abuja.
The release quotes NITDA’s DG as saying, “We have over two hundred and ninety-three processes to automate but we are selecting them one after the other to achieve the goal of the Agency. We do this for other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) also, we have other initiatives in place to help them achieve digital transformation”, the DG noted.
According to the Director-General, NITDA organises a lot of trainings and has a technical Working Group which started about three years ago, and saddled with the task of training representatives from different MDAs who are later asked to nominate people that will become champions to promote digital transformation in their respective organisations.
“We train them on e-Government and digital transformation in general, so that they can start the advocacy within their MDAs”.
“Moreso, we help some MDAs through the journey, like two years ago, Shippers Council came to us, we helped them with trainings, they documented their processes and have started automation. Also, we are currently working with the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI)”, the DG said.
Inuwa reiterated the fact that although technology is a tool, if the supposed users are not ready to utilise it and open to its endless possibilities, then, the expected results would never be attained.
“If your processes are not optimised and re-engineered, it will be difficult to automate your services”, the Director-General stressed.
The NITDA Boss who took time to share with his visitors, NITDA’s digitisation trajectory, with the aid of slide shows, explained the different approaches and workings of automation as adopted in the Agency, which he said is called “NITDA Digital Transformation Playbook”.
After narrating how tedious it was during the early days of his first appointment as NITDA DG, where he practically had to deal with treating tons of memos and mails manually and at the same time had to receive guests, Inuwa recounted how the process then, affected the productivity of the Agency, which necessitated the need to build a high velocity organisation that will engender high performance and turn over the desirable results.
“To achieve that, we had to reimagine ourselves, take a closer look at our mandate to draw up salients points, then, we came up with a new vision of where we want to be as well as core values that will be binding on all in the Agency”.
“We had to develop a 2P2CT Framework (i.e People, Process, Content, Culture amd Technology) and deliberately disrupt the way we do things, so that we can come up with a new way of doing them.
Inuwa, while maintaining that corruption happens when there is a human contact, added that technology can help eliminate that.
“I believe if we can digitise government’s services, it will really address the corruption challenges we have in the country”, Inuwa said..
