In today’s digital world most offices you enter is inundated with finding another solution to streamline work, and to take things ''to the cloud." Keeping everything stored in a digital format, whether on computer drives, flash drives or in cloud-based systems, is cheaper than printing and storing it on paper. This eliminates the cost of shredding services for paperwork with sensitive information.

1. A proposed solution which conveys how the nature of work is changing
and what a Public Procurement Agency in Nigeria can do to prepare
and support her workforces
1.0 Introduction:
In today’s digital world most offices you enter is inundated with finding another
solution to streamline work, and to take things ''to the cloud." Keeping everything
stored in a digital format, whether on computer drives, flash drives or in cloud-based
systems, is cheaper than printing and storing it on paper. This eliminates the cost of
shredding services for paperwork with sensitive information.
I work for a state Bureau on Public Procurement a regulatory agency in Nigeria
established under the State Public Procurement Law. The agency is primarily to
regulate, set standards, monitor and oversee public procurement with the goal of
ensuring transparency, accountability, competition, economy, fitness for purpose and
achieve value for money for all state government procurement activities including
disposal.
2.0 Problem:

2. The Bureau currently interfaces with over Ninety-six (96) Procuring Entities (PEs)
(which includes Ministries, Departments, Agencies and Local Government Councils)
for the implementation of the public procurement law in the State. The law amongst
others requires each of these PEs to provide certain levels of documentation at
different stages of the procurement process.
The process requires the PEs to submit some prerequisite documents for interrogation
prior to approval. Presently, this voluminous documents are received in formats that
are usually time consuming to retrieve and analyze. Below are some of issues Bureau
face in course of submission and interrogation of this documents;
1. The amount of space this voluminous documents take up is too much which has
led the Bureau taking up more rooms just to fit the files which in turn interrupts
staff productivity levels. These because the documents include procurement plan,
project specific plan, tenders, bid evaluation and contract award documents, etc
2. Most of this documents are submitted by hand so they are prone to damage and
being misplaced.
3. Interrogating this documents can be very time consuming. Not only do we have to
organize and store the files, hunting down the information when it is need can be
time consuming.
4. Most of this documents are highly sensitive a misplaced documents can easily be
placed in the wrong hands.
5. Although some of the documents come in soft-copy but to interrogate it some will
have to be printed thereby paper and toners have to be consumed. Because we use
paper documents the overhead costs keeps going high because we have pay for
printer toners and paper. One might think this is insignificant, overtime it’s a lot of
money that can be used in better ways.
3.0 Solution:
In order to provide a seamless solution to these problems, the Bureau should
developed and deployed a robust electronic data management systems that could

3. convert data from primary sources, process, collate, store and archive them in a
central location for ease of access, analysis, visualization and reporting. This
innovation would serve as an information and document repository with capability to
process and archive various types of information in different sizes (large & small e.g
A3, A4, A5 etc.) and in different format (Pdf, JPEG, XPS, XML, Plain word etc.).
4.0 Possible Obstacles
Despite the presence of change all around us, organizational change does not come
easy, however. Implementation failures mostly are caused by employee and middle
manager resistance to change. However, senior leaders and managers over-estimate
how much change they can force on the organization.
Some obstacles that might impede the implementation of a document management
system are;
1. Fear of the Unknown:
Employees may feel the need to cling to the old ways of filing or documenting
because it was a more secure, predictable way.
2. Lack of Competence:
This is one area that employee will not admit openly. This a major reason why
employees resist change. The implementation of an electronic document
management system will definitely necessitate changes in skills, and most
employees will feel that they won’t be able to make the transition well.
3. Lack of Reward:
“Common business saying that managers get what they reward”.
The ministry, departments and agencies employees might resist the
implementation of this solution if they do not see anything in it for them in
terms of rewards.
4. Office Politics:

4. It is common to find in-house office politics in a government parastatal where
some staff will resist innovation just to “show or prove” that the idea is wrong.
Also they resist the change because of the personnel leading the project for
reasons that the staff is not up to the task in their own view.
5. Loss of Control:
The sense of control over our work environment that comes with familiar
routine might be lost with this new implementation. With the automation of
certain routine task employee will be asked to change the way they operate
this might make employees feel powerless and confused.
5.0 Proposed Solutions to the Obstacles
1. This implementation requires not springing surprises on people! The state
government employees needs to be prepared for the change. In the absence
of continuing a two-way communication with heads of agencies, grapevine
rumors will fill the void and sabotage any change effort.
2. There is a need for motivation in terms of reward support the change over
the long run. This often means that organizational reward systems must be
altered to support the change that management wants to implement. The
reward does not have to always be major or costly.
3. Employees are more likely to understand and implement changes when
they feel they have some form of control. In the course of the development
and implementation of this new solution the doors of communication
should be kept open soliciting input, support, and help from employees.
Employees should know the importance of their contributions.
6.0 Benefits of the Solution to Government
1. The successful implementation of the EDMS will eliminate data redundancy,
maintain consistency of data, and minimize the workload involved in entering and

5. updating your data by both MDAs(Ministries, Departments and Agencies) and
the Bureau
2. Government officers can access procurement data directly using electronic search
tools, or find documents using known parameters. Citizens or any stakeholders
can also search for and display documents (original application files) via the
Internet/intranet. By reducing access time and the workload involved in routine
tasks, which can lower government costs considerably.
3. The Bureau can use document distribution to distribute documents that are
managed using the document management (DM) functions either manually or
automatically according to company-specific processes. This ensures that the
employees responsible or external partners can view or process up-to-the-minute
information.