Wasa to introduce monitoring system for employees

LAHORE: Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) is going to establish an android based application for surveillance of its patrolling guards and revenue collection staff to efficiently monitor and log the performance of their staff and to improve the complaint registration and troubleshooting system.

The Agency had been using the age old system where a person would either visit the Wasa local office or call in to register the complaint, Wasa officials said, adding the head office would then allocate the problem/ complaint to the area manager who listed it down in a register and then added it to the schedule list of the staff. Currently, patrolling guards and revenue staff (recovery officers and bill delivery guys) visit their assigned routes on daily basis following a schedule provided by Wasa. This schedule is made manually and distributed ahead of time.

The same practice would be used for internal core operations such as revenue collection in case of delays and non-payments. The revenue collection staff makes trips to assigned locations and reports to the office regarding the trips made and the successful and unsuccessful recoveries. However, there was no way, other than the word of mouth to know for sure if the staff was actually doing the field work and ensuring the Agency’s interest.

Similarly the patrolling guards that are entrusted with surveillance and security of Wasa equipment and devices at designated areas and routes which they have to identify missing or damaged items on an everyday and weekly basis, as per the schedule. However, monitoring of the staff to ensure that the trips were really made and not just logged in the paper-register was not possible with this operating system.

In a Memorandum of Understanding recently signed between Wasa and Punjab Information Technology Board, a number of technological interventions were discussed, agreed and approved to improve the system of municipal services.

For this particular problem, PITB offered to develop an android based application for surveillance of patrolling guards and revenue collection staff, said Zahid Aziz, Managing Director Wasa. “The new system will push the schedule automatically to Wasa official on application. Furthermore, geo location and time can automatically be fetched from the application, providing transparency to the higher management,” he revealed. He maintained that in case of a complaint (for example, if a manhole cover is stolen), upon visit of the location, the application will have option to take pictures of the location before and after the resolution of the complaint.

A state-of-the-art centralised command control centre for Wasa, LDA will be established. All IT-based solution and their dashboards will be hosted in this Centralised Command Control Centre. Dedicated IT staff will be hired, whose responsibility will be to monitor the relevant dashboards on round-the-clock basis and take prompt actions based on alert generation, MD Wasa revealed.

He told that the optimisation of human resource should be the key concern of any organisation and if that can be achieved through the assistance of IT interventions and solutions, we should embrace that technology. This android application, he said, will not only make patrolling and recovery operation more effective, but also economical as fake trips would not be logged in.

Academician and Research Fellow Masters in International Public Policy Johns Hopkins University Raheem-ul-Haque while commenting said that IT interventions in governance processes is always a welcome step as long as they are well-thought out and target key areas instead of excessive needless obsession with tech overloading a system. He said that municipal facilities are at the heart of public service and governance and this novel approach would benefit Wasa. He however was of the view that the work ethic culture of government departments also needs to evolve with these interventions as tech can only do so much.

Zahid Aziz, when asked about the change in the employee culture, said that this app would intend to do exactly that as it provides for an incorruptible system of checks and accountability. He said that developing a culture of service delivery dedication requires a system that would incentivise performance and penalise dereliction, however, concrete monitoring of performance is at the core of this practice.

This web and mobile-based application will serve as Document Management System for incoming as well as outgoing posts. It will also enable the users to mark diaries and to check the posts which are marked to them even if they are out from their office. The users will get notification via SMS for posts with high priority and for the critical complaints. It will help us to track record against subject, document type, diary number, department, barcode number, priority and date, MD Wasa said and concluded that ultimately it will reduce the time to take action on any post which was previously delayed due to physical un-reach/delay.