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Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has charged stakeholders across the broad spectrum of ICT on the need for professional delivery of services and products.
Abdullahi, while speaking at a recent one-day Consumer Protection Forum, organised by NITDA, reiterated the agency’s commitment to creating an enabling environment for vendors and consumers to ensure that “extant rules’ are applied on all government and information technology contracts.”
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The workshop, which drew participants from various ministries departments and agencies (MDAs), was organised to educate participants on rudiments of awarding IT contracts in their respective organisations.
Abdullahi said one of the seven pillars of NITDA’s’s Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan (SRAP) – Developmental Regulation – is to ensure efficient delivery of IT products and services.
Abdullahi who was represented by Acting Director, Standards Guidelines and Framework, Mr. Olawumi Oladejo, stressed the need for mutual understanding between stakeholders and the agency in developing standards and capacity building.
He added that IT sector played a pivotal role in getting the country’s economy out of recession, and recorded the highest growth rate in Q1 of 2020 as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS.)
IT is the only sector that recorded double digit growth rate and exceeded the aggregate of all the seven fastest growing sectors making it to lead in the year 2020 and in Q1 of 2021. The sector’s growth has inspired interest in protecting consumers’ interest, said the NITDA boss.
The Consumer Protection Forum is a platform through which NITDA seeks to bring vendors and consumers in the IT Industry together to address challenges in service delivery, said Abdullahi; adding that the forum is an avenue to create awareness of consumer rights on IT products and services.
His words: “Issues related to general IT products between consumers and service providers where to be looked in holistically.
“To this end, issues bordering on our past Consumer Protection Forum and subsequent complaints within the industry, NITDA has developed guideline for the introduction of Service Level Agreement (SLA) to aid government Information Technology Contracts,”
While presenting his paper titled ‘Ensuring Sustainability in IT Projects Through Service Level Agreement (SLA,)’ Barrister Babatunde Bamigboye focused on areas of ensuring sustainability in IT projects through SLA, challenges, general formalities of contracts, specific formalities of SLAs in IT amongst many others.
