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Digitisation of the work processes of Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) will strengthen the taming of corruption across Nigeria, said Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi.
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Abdullahi spoke at a recent visit to the ICPC in Abuja where he assured the anti-graft agency of NITDA’s readiness to collaborate with it to drive digitisation of its services and monitoring corrupt practices in public institutions.
“We have over 293 processes to automate but we are selecting them one after the other to achieve the goal of the agency,” said Abdullahi to the ICPC’s Chairman, Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu.
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Adding that automation is a journey and not a one off process, he said “we do this for other ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) also, we have other initiatives in place to help them achieve digital transformation. I believe if we can digitise government’s services, it will really address the corruption challenges we have in the country.”
The NITDA boss added that the agency “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).”
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.”
While recommending what he called the ‘NITDA Digital Transformation Playbook’ he said “If your processes are not optimised and re-engineered, it will be difficult to automate your services” adding that NITDA had in the four years undergone re-engineering process to build a high velocity organisation that will engender high performance and turn over the desirable results.
His words: “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 and Technology) and deliberately disrupt the way we do things, so that we can come up with a new way of doing them.”
Earlier, the ICPC Chairman, Aliyu, had expressed the commission’s intent to work with NITDA and fight corrupt practices with technology as a resource.
His words: “When you look at the mandate of ICPC, the first responsibility is to ensure that it helps in preventing corruption, then investigate issues of corruption, prosecute, where there is a clear case of corruption, established through investigation. So, with a lot of changes observed over the years, particularly, since the creation of the Commission in 2000, we believe that aligning or collaborating with NITDA to digitise our processes will boost our services and speed up deliverables.”
