An Incident Management Prototype

Abstract

Today, citizens have become more vocal about their needs and more sophisticated in their expectations of the government. The government's mandate is to improve public service to its citizens through e-governance. However, the government has failed to interact with its citizens. The only attempt at e-governance by the authorities is putting up static websites. But these websites provide no form of feedback, interactivity and participation by the citizens. Ideally, local authorities are supposed to have real time information on the status of infrastructure in their localities for them to be able to manage them effectively. Lack of real time and accurate information on incidents, therefore leading to poor service management due to inadequate information, is considered a problem in discharging these duties. The purpose of this research was to find out the relevant information and structure that would be suitable in an e-government platform. The researcher studied and reviewed the existing e-government architectures and studied the system in use by the County Government of Nairobi. The research done revealed that the public had no real time participation and interaction with the government when it came to incident reporting. Incident management was therefore almost impossible due to little or no information and this impaired service delivery by the County Government to its citizens. The results of the study were the design and implementation of an incident management prototype to connect citizens and the government. To achieve this, a web based platform was developed, which allows a public user to log an incident through a web portal. A trigger is sent to the CGN help desk notifying them of an incident that has been reported, with its particulars including location via GPS. The help desk then re-directs the incident to the relevant department for action, where the department supervisor assigns the task to an artisan electronically for action. Once the artisan completes the task, it is marked in the system as completed. Reports from the prototype helped management make informed decisions and improve service delivery