NPA explores digital techniques to enhance efficiency

POISED to enhance its service delivery, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), has embarked on the preservation and digital archiving of its important and epochal achievements.

In this regard, the Authority has commenced a capacity building project aimed at developing strategies to make NPA very relevant, now and in many years to come.

This will involve the publication, documentation and archiving of achievements of NPA management.

In a maiden bespoke session organised by KITTR Consulting, for the staff of NPA, who are going to take the lead in the transformational stride, the Lead Consultant of the project Saada Baba-mohammed, urged participants to seize the unique opportunity provided by the Hadiza BalaUsman-led management to upscale their knowledge on digital preservation and archiving.

She added that: “There is no training which is negative. The project is expected to cover a wide range of areas ranging from communication, documentation and then archiving of document. I believe at the end of the exercise, what they are expected to do is to go back to their respective offices, look at where they got it wrong, and then add value to it, and see how they can move forward in terms of keeping records.”

Speaking at the event, the General Manager, Corporate and Strategic Communications, NPA, Abdullahi Goje, said they are not only training, but building capacity to improve service delivery at the ports.

He noted that NPA officials interact with a lot of people from different background, hence the need for training to ensure that they add value to the already existing system, adding that facilities have been put in place for the training, as the organisation had since moved from analogue to digital.

A Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Dr. Ismail Ibraheem, said constructive engagement with key stakeholders requires that NPA embraced the infrastructure and architecture necessary for preserving and archiving of important documents for current use as well as for posterity.

Ibraheem, who spoke on: “Communicating effectively with key and critical stakeholders,” noted: “we live in a brutal and unforgiving world of shared experience accentuated by the pervasive presence of the media and globalisation. It is therefore imperative to develop as an organisation in the image you want the world to see you. This is why documentation, archiving, and digital preservation are imperative.”

Similarly, the Senior Librarian, Unilag, Dr. Ngozi Ukachi, who also doubles as Chairperson, Information Technology Section, Nigerian Librar y Association, spoke on “Digital Preservation of Archival Material.”

She argued that the training would enable NPA to store old materials to meet the needs of information seekers, who want this to be available and accessible on the go in the digital age. Stressing that the world is now one huge electronic place, she added that the training would give NPA staff the knowledge and skills for preserving and archiving useful valuable documents in the digital age.

She urged NPA and similar organisations to follow the lead of higher institutions, which have developed repositories for storing digital archival materials.