Kashifu Inuwa, director-general of the National Information
Technology Development Agency (NITDA), says the University Transparency Accountability
Solution (UTAS) failed three integrity tests.
Inuwa spoke to journalists on Wednesday after the federal
executive council (FEC) meeting in Abuja.
According to him, the tests were meant to qualify UTAS —
which was brought forward by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) —
as an alternative payment platform to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel
Information System (IPPIS).
ASUU has been on strike since February 14, and part of the
reasons for the industrial action is that the federal government has refused to
accept UTAS as a payment platform to replace the IPPIS.
Speaking on the matter, Inuwa said ASUU is currently
reviewing the system.
“When we received the request to review UTAS, you know,
building a complex system like UTAS that involves employees’ personal data, and
also payment system, we have to subject it to best practice tests before
approving,” he said.
“Normally, when we are reviewing that kind of system, we
perform three tests. Firstly, because when you’re building system, it’s not
just about the technology, you need to consider the people that will use this
system and the process. 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. Then, you need to identify the capabilities you need to
achieve that your business objective.
“Part of the capability is the technology you need to bring
in and the people that will operate the technology, because technology is
always a tool that will help you to achieve an objective or to do your work. If
you bring the tool before knowing what to do with it, it will be useless.”
He said NITDA conducted a user acceptance test, a
vulnerability test to check for possibility of hacking, and a stress test to
prevent the system from crashing.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com