The application will be used by the National Records Service (NRS) personnel to monitor turn-around time of files within the ministries, departments and agencies as well as individual officers.
Minister Baboucar Bouy said proper records management supports efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery, adding that it also supports planning, informed decision-making, support continuity and consistency.
He thus described it as a critical prerequisite in enhancing the realisation of government development objective tasks undertaken in different offices.
Minister Bouy said the state of affairs has the potential of slowing decision-making process in government thus affecting overall service delivery, given the fact that there is no means of tracking file movement in a systematic way.
According to the Public Service Minister, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between those officers who act fast on the cases that reach their offices and those who would take ages to act on files without any good reason.
He stressed the need for efficiency in delivery of public service and the need to improve the quality of these services to meet the expectations of service recipients. He added that this makes it necessary to develop a system that would monitor the movement of files at different levels in the decision-making process.
To fulfill this requirement he continued, the National Records Service (NRS) in collaboration with the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education Management Information System (EMIS) team initiated the development process.
“Through the collaboration efforts of these two institutions, File Tracking Application System (FTAS) is to be piloted in ten MDAs and later to be rolled out to the rest of the civil service,” he disclosed.
He called on officials at the MDAs to cooperate fully with the data collectors and work together to address the development challenges of the country rather than competing.
Director of NRS, Bartholomew Marong and head of IT at MoBSE, Alpha Bah all spoke at the ceremony.
The launching followed a two-day training of record officers drawn from ministries, departments and agencies on the use of the system.
