FG launches NGEA portal to promote digital investment

The Nigerian government, on Thursday, launched the Nigeria Enterprise and Architecture (NGEA) portal to enhance technology investment.

The minister of communications and digital economy, Isa Pantami, while launching the portal, inaugurated chairpersons of digital transformation technical working groups of federal public institutions (FPIs) during a virtual meeting.

NGEA is a framework that articulates a disciplined way of organising enterprise resources in order to provide capabilities that enable the achievement of expected values from every ICT investment.

It provides a clear road map towards government digital transformation in Nigeria.

“Feedback from the stakeholders’ engagement revealed that implementation of the framework cannot be effective without a baseline data on the state of IT deployment in federal public institutions.”

The baseline data will adequately establish as-is (the current state of IT in government) and provide insights into how to-be (government digital transformation agenda) would be appropriately achieved.

Also, the output of this exercise will inform developmental policies and programs targeted at closing existing gaps and improving inefficiency of IT systems in the public sector.

The director-general of National Information Technology Development Agency, Inuwa Abdullahi, said the project will promote digital services.

“The NGEA proposed an operating model that has two value propositions,” he said.

He said the first value proposition promotes one government (whole-of-government) agenda, while the second guarantees the autonomy of each FPIs to make certain decisions around business processes, digital services and applications.

“The seven layers of NGEA which are business, service, data, application, IT infrastructure, security and performance are centred around people and processes.”

Mr Abdullahi said each layer has high-level expectations for FPIs and as well specifying best practices, standards, tools, reference models.

Also, it will provide recommendations that will help achieve the value propositions and citizens expectations for government digital services.

In order to properly govern and ensure desirable outcomes from every IT deployment by FPIs, the NGEA proposes an IT engagement model that intends to institutionalise government-wide IT governance, IT project management and coordinating mechanisms.

The coordinating mechanism is a watchdog governance structure which is being carried out by the National IT Project Clearance Committee.

The government-wide IT governance and IT projects management structure is proposed to be carried out at the level of FPIs themselves.