Even after six years, govt fails
ISLAMABAD: Competent IT professionals are increasingly quitting government departments and ministries due to lack of a career path and heightening hostility from non-technical seniors. Senior government officials admit that lack of committed IT executives at mid as well as senior level was the biggest hurdle in the simplification of outdated procedures and bureaucratic red-tappism.
Besides others, even the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has yet to fill up key vacancy of IT adviser while except Tariq Badshah, who has earned an exceptional fifth year of extension in his Management Position 1 (MP1) job, one can’t find a long-serving professional in the ministry since its inception in 2000. Technically, each ministry and every government department should have IT professionals permanently on board, given the changing nature of official correspondence (through emails) and security required to guard the data in the hard disks.
Though the Estacode offers special treatment to professionals with technical expertise for both promotion and hiring, the IT professional are facing step-motherly treatment due to direct inductions for higher posts instead of promoting the already employed, competent young officer with the similar expertise. Para IV of pages 287-288, Estacode 2006, under the title ‘Specialist Cadres’ suggests that the general promotion guidelines “will not be strictly applicable to civil servants who are in specialist cadres such as doctors, teachers, and professors, research scientists and incumbents of purely technical posts for promotion within their own line of specialism.”
The Estacode section further reads: “The criteria for promotion in their case would continue to be the technical qualifications, experience and accomplishments (research, publications etc.) relevant to their specialism.” Most of the fast developing countries give lucrative incentives and private sector-style career path to IT professionals in order to retain the competent technical professional despite luring offers from the private sector companies. India and Malaysia, for example, offer the most appropriate example in this regard where every government department has its own IT wing, inducted from the private sector with prospects to reach the highest positions in the government set-up.
So far, the IT Ministry and National Reconstruction Bureau have been unable to deliver any concrete solutions to meet shortage of competent manpower in the IT sector. Though a full-fledge Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) has been fruitless searching its future path under the IT Ministry since 2002, neither the goal of electronic governance is anywhere in sight nor the very office could, at least, adapt to a paperless environment. Even over four years after EGD’s creation, the country has no rules and regulations for a paperless government office. “There are issues like electronic filing system, electronic signature etc,” said a senior government official.
“Even the EGD’s internal official correspondence is being carried out on papers instead integrated electronic filing system along with authorized digital signatures and Intranet,” admitted a senior official in the ministry. Despite its ‘golden’ history of computerizing millions of national ID cards, even Nadra depends on traditional correspondence system (through dispatch riders) with its parent ministry as well as others. Giving the official version, Tariq Badshah, an IT official, recalled an ‘informal’ survey, conducted by speaking to the IT professionals working in the government on contract, as to whether they would be interested to switch over to an equivalent position in the Basic Pay Scale of the government, most were not interested in joining the cadre”.
Tariq said the IT ministry felt that cadre model was somewhat conducive to lower grades (12-18) but was less feasible for senior levels. He said: “Since one of the major issues to be resolved was to provide a career path to the computer professionals, a cadre till grade 18 or even 19 was thought to only breed mediocrity and possibly incompetence, the idea of having an IT cadre on the same lines as the existing cadres was not going to solve the problem.”
Tariq explained: “Through the feedback from the outgoing employees as well as the contract employees currently on the job, the ministry has gathered that the possible reasons for this high turnover include, rapidly increasing salaries in the market, no career path, lack of training and growth opportunities, security and continuity, and a general feeling that they are not part of the organization.”
According to proposals pending with the government, IT professionals could be attracted in the public sector by inducting them permanently in government pay scale but offering them a proper career ladder up to BPS-22. IT professionals opting for permanent government jobs should be given various allowances to compensate their earning in comparison with the private sector competitors.
For the first batch, the currently employed IT professionals in various grades can be inducted directly into the cadre while the next generation should be hired through FPSC criteria and evaluation. After the cadre is created, each ministry, depending on the size and complexity of the IT needs, would have an appropriate number of IT posts allocated to it. An officer, once recruited into the IT cadre through the FPSC, would be transferred from one job to the other as per normal practice, and would be promoted as per normal seniority rules of the government. The senior grades in the cadre would be filled through promotion from within the pool of officers.
With the rapid hiring of many contractual senior IT officials, the security of sensitive official data has always been a key concern for the top decision-makers as well as intelligence agencies. These contractual “guardians of nation’s electronic data”, on one hand, look after various vital projects, and on the other, never a miss applying for vacancies in the private sector.
“For example, it takes an individual with access to key data a few minutes to burn a DVD and leave the office without a clue as he or she is not under oath and whose security was never cleared by the intelligence agencies,” said a top official in the Establishment Division. He explained that the contractually hired IT officials have little sense of responsibility and ownership of the data. “If we fail to implement IT cadre in the government sector and unable to provide permanent IT related posts from BPS 17 to 21, brainy IT officers would continue to leave government department,” a senior official serving special wing in the cabinet division said.
“We have been lucky that no major case of stealing of national database has occurred despite poor security apparatus employed in the government offices,” he explained. IT official Tariq told The News in writing that the ministry carried out significant analysis about the pros and cons of creating such a cadre. “The advantages included the stability and continuity provided by a permanent cadre but in the final conclusion, it was clear that these advantages would be swept away by the fallout of having a static organization with limited growth.”
Interestingly, while identifying the disease rightly, Tariq though admitted that a solution was needed to address these shortcomings, but he maintained that “a perfect solution is not possible because some of the problems are orthogonal”. “For instance, while security and continuity is to be addressed it also known that an extremely secure job with automatic promotions creates dead wood,” the ministry official said.
On the other hand, there are examples of the Ministry of Finance where ex-cadre IT jobs have been created and various individuals have been at these posts for decades. A source said: “Whilst they are doing an alright job, if there had been IT professionals from the private sector in the same ministry, perhaps more could have been achieved than what has been done so far.” The other departments such as State Bank of Pakistan, ZTBL, (former Agriculture Development Bank of Pakistan), Monopoly Control Authority, Pakistan Railways, Securities & Exchange Commission and Pakistan Post Office etc have similar set-ups. The official source said: “Whoever is hired against a particular position in these departments remains at that post for many years, till either the post is upgraded or the person retires. Obviously, in such an environment, it is not realistic to assume that this person will drive the computerization process in an energetic fashion.”
According to Tariq, even if the government matches the market salaries, the market dynamics may create a gap within a year or two, thus “the model would be optimal rather than perfect.” The IT professionals, on the other hand, predominantly support a proper cadre with a clear career path and better incentives to meet the pending goals of computerization of the government database as well as achieving the goal of e-governance. Though the developing economies in Asia, Latin America and Africa around the world have successfully developed solutions to this problem, six years after the creation of the ministry, Tariq said “it cannot be done in haste”.
“The objective is to have a long-lasting solution than to have a stopgap solution,” he comfortably maintained. Dr Amir Matin, former MD of Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), said: “Neither the permanent ex-cadre jobs (such as those in the Pakistan Computer Bureau), nor the purely contract jobs (such as those in the EGD), were able to provide the right kind of manpower to ensure that the government IT functions keeps on running.” Other government bodies, such as the three arms of the military, have tried to address this issue by creating a special branch within their service. For instance, the army has what was originally called the Army Data Management branch, now known as the C4I Directorate where regular officers are sent for training and subsequently inducted into the C4I Directorate to serve against various technical positions created in divisions, brigades and other formations in the field, as well as the headquarter. The problem within the armed forces also remains the same since such officers are not being promoted in their own branch of service.
Dr Matin told The News that a concept paper on IT cadre lines was considered not only within the ministry but also by the establishment division and the Finance Ministry. The News learnt that the three ministries failed to evolve a feasibility of the cadre and the idea was knocked down allegedly by the officials with vested interest who are more convenient working in MP1 or MP2 and below.
Dr Matin has two solutions to the problem:
“One option would be to create positions within ministries as needed, but not to staff them with a permanent IT cadre, but to recruit people on long-term contracts, such as five to seven years, and give them market salaries. “Since these would be contract jobs, dead wood could not accumulate, since at the end of the contract period, all that would need to be done is to not renew the contract,” he explained.
Source: The News
Date:10/16/2006
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