ERP at Secretariat
Fire at Mantralaya, Mumbai
The massive fire and deaths at the Maharashtra Secretariat in June 2012 is a grim reminder to all of us also, as to the under preparedness to deal with such a situation at our Secretariat in Chennai and also in all other Government offices. Incidentally we had our fire drill at our office only a few days earlier.
One of the major criticisms against Government would be that files have been destroyed, and many reasons will be attributed to that. But there is a way out, if we can adopt an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution at all our offices, on a cloud-based model. In fact the IT department in Secretariat Chennai went entirely paperless from November 3rd to December 3rd 2011, till my transfer from the post of Secretary IT. The application we developed along with NIC Delhi christened by us as ASSIST (Automated Software Suite for Integrated Secretariat Transactions) available at http://assist.tn.gov.in is a full fledged ERP for making all aspects of our daily work at Secretariat or for that matter in any Government office completely web based... One can clear files anytime anywhere. Our SDC (State Data Centre) is a state of the art Data Centre and can host the application and all departments can create their own partitions and start working on files online.
The application is being used in PMO, Cabinet Secretariat, and many other GOI departments. I am pleading with all our decision makers to adopt ASSIST or for that matter any other ERP and deploy the same at our SDC, making the work in Government transparent, fast, efficient, making services available to our Citizens that much faster, and most important, fireproof!
Is anybody listening?