Miengativapp - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

Engativa's Town Hall developed “miengativapp”, a web-type application that was implemented to support process management. It was implemented because of the pandemic as a tool to manage the office remotely. It benefits around 300 professionals in the development of their work, creating agility, organization, and transparency in information handling, paired with a unique approach to public administration in the city at a local level.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Miengativapp is a web-type application, developed with a low code tool called stripcase that facilitates processes management among different areas of Engativa's town hall. The app was developed in response to the need to have clearer, more precise, and real-time information for decision-making and better control of the flow of information in the data pipeline. Additionally, taking into account that during the pandemic all areas of this public organization had to continue their operation with all workers working from home, this tool allowed remote access to generate, control and consult the information that was handled in Excel and Word files before the implementation.

Objectives of the app:

Obtain the necessary information for decision-making quickly and efficiently.
Avoid errors in completion and information handling from different areas of Engativa's town hall.
Optimize internal processes of the areas involved in the application.
Be a reference at the local level in the management of processes and transparency of information.
Leave a technological tool for future public administrators to help in their management.

The application allows the generation, control, and management of information in different offices as follows:

In the Mayor's office it allows the report generation from other areas of the organization, as well as the registration and requests' control made by the different control entities.
In the planning office, the application allows the profile and position generation of the people who will be hired to work in the organization, as well as the registration and control of the projects that will be hired and executed for the benefit of the population of the locality of Engativá. In the same way, this allows having control of the budget invested and generates more efficient management of resources by having an easier way of controlling and knowing where these budgets will be invested and executed.
In the recruitment and hiring office, the application receives the information generated by the planning area and manages and processes the different contracting requests to be made, relating the information to the state contracting system (SECOP II) for complete knowledge of the information; it allows the generation in an agile, fast and error-free manner of the information contained in the papers of the contracts of natural persons. It also helps with content generation for the contracts' additions, requests for budget registration, and generation of labor certificates to mention the most common ones.
In the press office, it allows the processing of different requests to the area, such as the development of graphic and audiovisual pieces, and the production of coverage, campaigns, and broadcasts. This has allowed time control for the development of these requests by generating a pipeline that allows being carried out and executed correctly on time.
In the logistics and warehouse office, it allows the generation of requests for elements to support the development of events in the different places of the town, as well as the proper allocation of the vehicles available in the organization for their use, as well as the generation of stationery requests required month by month from each of the areas, allowing greater control of the available resources for optimal management.
In the project office, it allows programming of the information of the payments to be made to each project and establishes an order in the management of the different assigned budgets. Additionally, it allows the different contractors of the projects to collect information from the beneficiaries of each project in order to have a database that can characterize the beneficiary population of the public investment made in order to establish their priorities and needs, and thus be able to have relevant data to improve future and current projects with direct impact in the local citizenship.

This app began as a small idea in the pandemic (2020) to provide systematized information, and now due to iterations and improvements, it is continuing the integration of the offices and processes not included at the time. We expect quality and quantity of information to increase day by day and be a great source for future administrations. We can foresee automation of all the manual labor that we are still doing in the organization and we can envision an entity that can deliver quickly for all the stakeholders' requests it has.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

This technological development is a completely new and innovative concept, unique in its kind at a local public administration in Bogotá, since its creation it operates on the basis of efficiency and competitiveness, showing an advantage in the managing and handling of information to make decisions, responding to information needs of the different levels of the organization.

This project has great benefits for all the users of our organization since it gives them control and order over their tasks, as well as helps to generate the necessary information content in activities that are repetitive but of great importance for Engativa´s Town Hall, such as requests for various types of information memorandums, data queries and reports among different areas. In conclusion, the flow of information is more reliable and efficient since the implementation of the app.

What is the current status of your innovation?

This project has already completed its implementation phase to solve the initial problem that originated its creation regarding the pandemic and the correct flow of information. Then it has passed an iterative process of evaluation with the users in order to make the user experience better. We are now incorporating new features to the app that allows increasing the number of offices' process inside the app, taking into account the improvement in time management of the offices that started with it.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

Engativa´s town hall mayor gave the endorsement for the design and implementation of the app.
The leader of the planning office was the one who planned the development of the app, setting the objectives for the implementation.
An engineer from the planning office developed the app.
The area of Innovation iterates with the app and evaluates its usability with the users.
Each professional from different offices, provided key information about processes and management of their areas.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The Department of Technologies and Information of Bogota's District Government Secretariat, who provided the technological infrastructure that allowed the implementation of the application, as well as the required support.
300 hundred professionals of Engativa's Town Hall that based some of their day-to-day work on the features of the app.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Almost 100% decrease in typing errors, which avoids reprocessing and loss of time.
Interoperability of areas with unique and validated information.
Organization in the management of tasks, procedures, and requests.
Generation of reports in real-time.
Consolidation of information.

Methodology applied: We conducted a focus group with the different office managers to iterate and improve the usage of the app with the feedback they gave us for their particular processes. We did this at least once a month.

Results: In the future, we have two expectations to have all the manual processes working inside the app and to be a benchmark in processes' management and information administration in the city.

Challenges and Failures

The challenges presented with the application are basically the structuring and implementation of new developments because some of them have a high degree of technical complexity in order to achieve the desired objective and operability for a specific process in an office.

The relevant setbacks on the Project lie in the rescheduling of some processes that, when put into practice showed that they present flaws in the way in which office professionals used the information, more specifically in some press and logistics requests. On the other hand, the technological infrastructure that supports the application sometimes presents delays in the information processing, so an opportunity for improvement would be to have a server with better features. These challenges are basically faced on a day-to-day basis, determining possible failures or errors and drawing up an action plan to correct them.

Conditions for Success

To achieve success in a project like this, the conditions of infrastructure and support services are essential, since they help to guarantee the optimal functioning of the application and make everything work in a better way without any kind of setbacks. On the other hand, leadership and guidance are also of vital importance, since this establishes the path to follow to obtain the desired results, and provides order and logic for the development of the application.

Finally, a good disposition of the different work teams whose processes are systematized when presenting feedback on the application's operation in the day-to-day, since this allows it to improve and optimize its operation, making a continuous improvement and an obsession with the iteration a way of thinking about the project.

Replication

Our innovative application has not been replicated to date, but other public entities have shown interest in learning about it, knowing how it works, what it is for, and how it would help their internal processes, all in order to determine an action plan to look at the possibility of doing something similar that helps them, based on our experience and the knowledge we generated. On the other hand, the potential for the application to be replicated in the future is promising, since it would be very helpful to the other local mayors of the city to improve their internal processes, giving them the possibility of taking advantage of a new technology that integrates the basic and necessary information for optimal functioning of its different dependencies.

Lessons Learned

A technological tool like this offers the great possibility for public administration of alternating a job that usually had been developed exclusively in person with a job that can be developed virtually. Another lesson learned is that, although this tool allows part of the work to be done remotely, in any case, it is essential that there is always a person in charge for each area, who is monitoring the work of the other professionals. In the end, the data pipeline is structured and allows visualization of all the processes but the management of information is crucial to make that data actionable. Finally, a great lesson learned is that local administration must improve its relationship with new technologies in order to support the development of tasks on a daily basis because they facilitate and improve the way in which internal processes are being developed, allowing greater control and more effective information management.

Anything Else?

We are hoping to demonstrate how the local public way of administration here in Engativa could help to improve the daily life of public professionals and give them more time to analyze, interpret and produce insight to elaborate strategies that impact the citizens of the cities of the world.