Digitised records to boost RGD efficiency, says Green
SOME TWO million vital records relating to births, deaths, marriages, adoptions and deed polls at the Registrar General’s Department (RGD) are to be digitised, following a National Identification System (NIDS) contract signing ceremony.
Minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, Floyd Green, said it is a significant step in Jamaica’s digital transformation journey.
By digitising these records, he said processes at the RGD will be more efficient.
“We’ve seen reports from the World Economic Forum that a 10 per cent increase in digitisation leads to a 0.7 percent growth in GDP per capita. More importantly, it leads to the betterment of lives of our citizens,” Green said.
Through a national and international procurement process, expressions of interest were received from 18 companies.
Following that, a seven-member panel including non-voting technical experts from the InterAmerican Development Bank conducted the evaluation exercise, where Fujitsu emerged with the highest technical score.
Green said Fujitsu will install infrastructure at RGD’s head office to facilitate the digitisation of records created from 1930 to present.
He added that graduates of the Housing, Opportunity, Production and Employment (HOPE) Programme will be trained on the job, to assist in the digitising process.
In his address, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said the Jamaican society is becoming more sophisticated and in order to educe the complications of accountability and security, technology has to be introduced.
“When we say we are digitising our economy by introducing technology, it is about increasing our capacity to serve and take on complex functions in a simple way,” he said.
Holness said Jamaica has about 20 years of computer-generated records and about 200 years of paper-based records, which are stored in vaults.
“Though we have tried to secure them, they are still at risk and many of them are deteriorating naturally,” he said, adding that based on the year of birth, RGD employees have to physically search files in the archives to find a requested record.
Holness described that process as laborious and inefficient, sometimes resulting in a hit-ormiss situation because of similar names.
“When the business process is natively digital, meaning that it starts digital, there is usually the assignment of a unique ID. We are doing that unique identity now with the NIDS, so every record that is generated which creates what we call a civil event - a birth, death, wedding, change of names - those events can be uniquely identified to the individual that created them by virtue of the NIDS,” Holness said, adding is that Jamaicans will not have to worry about duplication of records.
NIDS is expected to provide a comprehensive and secure structure to enable the collection and storage of identity information.