One Human Rights Data System: When Technology Is Not the Goal

By 2023, according to the Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform (KemenPANRB), at least 27,400 applications had been built.

The sheer number of applications has created various potential problems, from duplicated functions and unintegrated services to fragmented data. The government has introduced the Electronic-Based Government System (SPBE) policy to address the tangle of issues involving these applications.

However, there is also a paradigm-level issue that needs diagnosing: how the bureaucracy views problems and determines the solutions to resolve them.

This way of thinking is reflected, for example, when periodic reporting prompts the creation of a digital reporting system, or when an agency seeks data on people with disabilities in a particular area and goes to considerable effort to build a dashboard.

Consider a central government agency that develops a system to establish the number of schools or community health centres in an area, down to village level. In principle, data on educational and health facilities form part of the sectoral data managed by the relevant ministries or agencies.

The question, then, is whether, before building a new system, the agency has identified available data sources, checked whether their definitions and coverage are suitable, and begun discussions with the data-producing agency about sharing and reusing the data.

In practice, digitalisation has yet to achieve optimal integration of either government services or data. Individual agencies can readily create applications, while fragmentation continues across the system. Data, however, are essential to developing evidence-based policy.