Transforming Sri Lanka: Calls for an incentive regime and policy changes

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

The second and final day of the inaugural FutureGov SAARC Summit 2012 explored further avenues of e-governance, offering valuable insights into areas such as land management, healthcare and financial inclusion, with the highlight of the day being the debate amongst two parliamentarians who raised and responded to several key issues

Modernising New Zealand’s border clearance

Ministry for Primary Industries, New Zealand Border Change Programme/Joint Border Management System Director Channa Jayasinha opened up the technical sessions by delivering a presentation on New Zealand’s Joint Border Management System (JBMS).

Commencing in January 2011, it is a five-year business transformation and modernisation system, the largest business transformation programme in the public sector which will cost $150 million over the next five years. The border system currently generates $10 billion in Government revenue every year, Jayasinha revealed.

“We are now building a modern border system which will provide many benefits. It is important to be efficient and connected in today’s complex world. Trade growth is increasing and we rely on the confidence that international trading partners have on border controls,” he explained.

Jayasinha went on to say that the system had to be implemented because the existing aging technology presents an increasing risk of failure and inflexible systems that will not be able to meet evolving expectations for border management and international facilitation initiatives. It will also ensure the delivery of modern integrated information systems.

“In terms of a single trade window, we are trying to move to a more streamlined portal where the industry could come in through an online capability. We will have a single system that will process craft, people and other goods,” Jayasinha said.  

“The solution itself is provided by IBM and Datacom – a large provider of ICT solutions in the Australasia market. The end-to-end technology is managed by the two companies. We are using off-the-shelf software as that makes it easier to be able to maintain the system instead on relying on customised software.”

The benefits include the faster processing of low risk travellers, easier compliance through a common set of electronic, better trade facilitation, less intervention in low risk good and crafts, different options for connecting to the system, increased disruption of criminal networks, better use of the agency staff’s time and access to better quality information amongst many others.  

“The life of the project is 10 years. In terms of agency efficiency and value for money, FTE savings will be around $ 41 million. Beyond phase one, we are looking to build more functionality, a new transaction processing system and a system to manage prosecutions. We also aim to recover 50 per cent of the costs from the industry with increased fees and levies,” he added.  

Strong and active cross agency governance has driven what we have achieved so far, he noted, acknowledging that the level of external monitoring and auditing imposed on the programme was underestimated and also required more effort than initially anticipated. Jayasinha also added that it is important to develop early a benefit realisation framework over the life of the programme and have persons accountable for capturing and reporting on the benefits.

“We are now six months away from launching the pilot for the trade single window and we will go live with the whole system next year,” he concluded.

Modernising land management

The first panel discussion of the day centred on modernising land management in the region and overcoming challenges in implementing land management systems. The panel featured Ministry of Land and Land Development Sri Lanka Senior Assistant Secretary P.M.P. Udayakantha, GIS Solutions Consultant Sarath Jayatilaka, Afghanistan Information Management Services Senior GIS Manager Ali Ahmad Wali and Bangladesh Space Research and Remote Sensing Organisation Principle Scientific Officer Fazlul Haque and was moderated by Business Process Reengineering Specialist and Consultant Harin Gunawardena.

Q: Going into modernisation, you work with six to seven agencies – what are your experiences with working with so many stakeholders?

Udayakantha: Actually it’s a real challenge we are facing, bringing together all the departments to one table and aligning them to follow one programme. The institutions have their inherent cultures which have to be respected and it’s a hard task but I think we are succeeding. Harmonising the developments carried out by the individual departments is also a tough task. The important thing is to change the attitude of the people and encourage the sharing of information.

Haque: The land management system is an important and complex system because it comprises of a lot of things – a lot of data and concepts and on these ground it’s important to build up databases and bring them all together on a common platform which will make it easier for users.

It is also necessary to create a very strong reliable multi-sourced database. We need to ensure the reliability of the database as well but how do you do this? Through systems such as high resolution DTS. We need to set up a state-of-the-art system and we need to establish the security of the database and a large authentic inquiry system so that it can be applied for other applications.

Q: What type of reliability is required for land use and title management?

Jayatilaka: I think the land titling database should be a very accurate database because people are very worried about their land. However the planning side of it, accuracy is not as important although there should be a certain level of accuracy. Technology has really improved and can transform basic surveying to precision surveying but I don’t think we should go for very high precision data for all databases.

Q: Most countries have only done about five to 10 per cent of capturing land data in a digitised form in this region – how can we address this issue?

Wali: We need a standard system in place for capturing data and to speed up the process, having high resolution imagery is necessary. In my country, we introduced International Land System (ILS) and this system speeds up the process a lot and we provide high resolution images and get other information from various offices and authorities and it’s based on a unique portal through which they are linked to each other.

Q: What’s been done in Sri Lanka on this front?

Udayakantha: Speeding up cadastral registry is a critical issue. Basically in this country we are very concerned about the accuracy of boundaries so we tried to develop something through satellite images. This is how we have been trying to speed up the process. Furthermore, there are certain inherent changes that will have to be introduced into the system and this will have to be an evolving process over the years. We hope to use satellite images in a better way and that is our only hope to complete this is a shorter time.