By: Lamin B. Darboe
Information Officer, MoPS
The Minister of Public Service, Administrative Reforms, Policy Coordination and Delivery, on Monday, July 31st, 2023 presided over the launching ceremony of the ‘File Tracking Application System’ (FTAS) at the Ministry’s Conference hall, Banjul.
The Application will be used by the National Records Service (NRS) personnel to monitor the turn-around time of files within the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) as well as individual officers.
Delivering his launching statement, Minister Baboucar Bouysaid proper records management support efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery, adding that it also supports planning, informed decision-making, support continuity, and consistency.
He said it is therefore a critical prerequisite in enhancing the realization of Government development objectives through the tasks they undertake in different offices.
Minister Bouy said the state of affairs has the potential of slowing the decision-making process in government thus affecting overall service delivery, given the fact that there is no means of tracking file movement systematically.
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 the delivery of public service and the need to improve the quality of these services to meet the expectations of service recipients, thus it deemed 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, and the National Records Service (NRS) in collaboration with the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education’s Management Information System (EMIS) team initiated the development process.
In his word, the Minister said: “Through the collaboration efforts of these two institutions i.e. MoBSE and NRS, File Tracking Application System (FTAS) to be piloted in ten MDAs and later to be rolled out to the rest of the civil service”.
He called on officials at the MDAs to receive and cooperate fully with the data collectors and work together to address the development challenges of the country rather than competing.
Director NRS, Bartholomew Marong, and the head of IT at MoBSE, Alpha Bah all spoke at the ceremony. The launching followed two-day training of record officers drawn from the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies on the use of the system.