resident Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has launched an initiative called INA Digital that seeks to integrate the systems and data of the approximately 27,000 existing applications operated by ministries and regional administrations.
In his opening remarks at the program’s launch event at the Presidential Palace on Monday, Jokowi told ministers and other central and regional government officials in attendance that the state bureaucracy should be geared toward making public services easier to access and use.
“But how can it be easy when ministries, government bodies and regional administrations have more or less 27,000 applications? Twenty seven thousand platforms that all run on their own and work on their own,” Jokowi said.
The Health Ministry alone reportedly contributed some 400 applications to that figure, while an unnamed ministry appeared to have 4,000 applications operating under its jurisdiction.
“Every time there’s a new minister, a new director general, there’s a new application. It’s the same thing with regional administrations. If there’s a change of governor or agency head, there’s a change of application. Everything is oriented toward projects, and that’s what we’ve stopped,” Jokowi said.
He was referring to a decision he made earlier this year to scrap an allocation of Rp 6.2 trillion (US$385 million) for app development from this year’s state budget.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.
Delivered straight to your inbox three times weekly, this curated briefing provides a concise overview of the day’s most important issues, covering a wide range of topics from politics to culture and society.
for signing up our newsletter!
Please check your email for your newsletter subscription.
View More Newsletter
“We must strengthen our digital public infrastructure [by building] a kind of ‘highway’ for digitizing public services. We must also strengthen our “govtech” transformation into one integrated portal, and that’s called INA Digital,” he added.
