By Dwelleth Morountodun
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) on Wednesday reiterated that it has implemented the Nigeria Government
Enterprise Architecture (NGEA) as road map for government digital transformation evolution in the country.
The Director-General (DG) of the agency, Mr. Kashifu Abdullahi, made the disclosure at the12th ISACA annual conference with the theme, “Accelerating Digital Transformation: The Nigerian Trends.”
The DG explained that NITDA embarked on the implementation of the NGEA framework to drive, short, medium and long term digital transformational impact.
He added that the framework provides direction enabling other government parastatals to easily, quickly, and conveniently execute digital initiatives. It also reduces the complexity associated with digital transformation and accelerates adoption across the board.
“The framework we designed at NITDA is in line with the digital transformation foundation laid by President Muhammadu Buhari, stressing that in October 2019, the president renamed and expanded the mandate of our ministry to cover the digital economy.
In November the same year, 2019, he added that the President unveiled the National Digital Economy Policy for Digital Nigeria, where he directed the Minister, Dr Ibrahim Pantami, to implement the policy.
On the same day, the president also directed all federal public institutions to set up a digital transformation technical working group and on 27th August.
According to him, the Minister inaugurated the first set of 100 federal public institutions’ digital transformation working group.
The idea behind setting the technical working group according to him is to consolidate on the achievements recorded under some of our initiatives such as the Nigeria e-Government Master Plan (NeGMP), Nigeria e-Government Interoperability Framework (Ne-GIF) and Nigeria Government Enterprise Architecture (NGEA).
The framework, he explained has 2 value propositions, firstly to promote one government digital service and secondly, to guarantees the autonomy of each federal public institutions to make individual decisions around business processes, digital services, and applications.
According to him, the current reality of COVID-19, digital transformation strategy focuses more on how to deliver digital service to Nigerians.
He said: “Having understood how important digital capabilities are in driving digital transformation, we have embarked on upskilling and reskilling Nigerians with appropriate knowledge and skills that the necessary building blocks for digital transformation.
“We have trained over 26,000 Nigerians this year alone on different digital skills to help them understand and embrace digital transformation.
“In addition to the capacity building, we have provided thousands of digital tools to Nigerians raging from artisan toolbox set, smart mobile devices, laptops to building community training centers, IT hubs, Innovation and Incubation Hubs and centers of excellence for emerging technologies.”