The Federal Government of Nigeria has declared that ASUU’s Universities Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) failed the integrity test and it is not fit for payment.
This is coming days after the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) declared a nationwide strike over the government’s inability to meet its demands.
It was accounted that the educational board believes that the government whom it no longer trusts is not willing to accept the UTA as a new means of receiving payment to replace the old Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System after it was announced that it failed the required test to prove that it was eligible for salary payments.
The new development was disclosed by the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) identified as Kashif Inuwa who expresses his fear that the new UTAS which were unable to pass it required test might crash alongside the information stored on it and would hinder the payment of salaries in the future.
According to Inuwa’s full words, he said;
“When we received the request to review UTAS, you know, building complex system like UTAS that involves employees’ data and also payment system, we had to subject it to do best practice tests before approving. Normally, when we are reviewing that kind of system, we perform three tests.
“Firstly, because when you’re building a system, it’s not just about the technology, you need to consider the people that will use this system and the process. If you don’t align people, processes and technology, you will never get results. No matter how good the technology is, if people don’t understand how to use it, they won’t use it. And if the process is different from the way the people work, they won’t use it. So, that is a process of building technology.
“First, you need to get the business requirement. What do you want to achieve? So, it’s not the technology that will come first, it is the business requirement; what do you want to achieve, then you need to identify the capabilities you need to achieve that your business objective.”
“We did all these three tests with them and the system couldn’t pass. We wrote the reports and submitted it back to the honourable minister, which he forwarded to all relevant institutions, including ASUU. As we speak now, ASUU is working, trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system and we will review it again. But that is just one half of the story,”
“The second half of the story is that we need to find where to put that system like IPPIS. We have a data centre built for it. That means we need to have the data centre, and we need to check to make sure it meets minimum requirement, because if you put people’s information and the system crashes, how can you pay them salary?
“There are a lot of things to do. As we speak, they’re trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system.”
