Platforms in Government

Platforms in Government? Is that a thing?

I have to admit thinking about platforms is extremely hard when you don't have a "techy" background. It gets harder to do when you want to extrapolate the concept to government. And it gets way harder when you come from a developing country where a CTO position is reduced to making sure that the servers don't crash (still important but less impressive). 

I try to think of platforms as the necessary foundation for any given development. It's the concrete or abstract structure that supports any given activity. Trying to come up with an example, first thing that comes to mind when I first entered to work in the Ministry of Social Development and Inclusion was the process of applying. They post jobs online and their description, requirements, salary, division, etc. (I never understood why there were independent hiring offices across governments that did basically the same thing.) 

I encountered that in order to apply to a position I had to enter to the application page (a.k.a. platform), subscribe, obtain an user ID and password, and register. After registering, I had to input all of my education information and attach the corresponding documents, as well as my job experience with precise dates and, again, a letter from my former employer certifying the dates and position I had held. 

It was a very tedious process, especially asking that of my former employers. However, is a way to apply online to a job, reducing the cost of going to the Ministry during regular business days and waiting in line to drop an envelope with the physical legalized copies. From what I had heard it certainly was a way to improve the process of applying, which is very tedious in itself. You only had to go through that process if you had been selected for a position after several interviews and then you had to drop off the documents in order for them to verify it. If anything, it was certainly a way to waste less paper, and time. 

I had never thought of this online application as a platform. Especially in terms of human resources, I started wondering why was it that only this Ministry had it. And then I realized that probably the others had it too, but each division of the Government did. Then I thought about how each branch would've had to put out a procurement notice or try to develop it in house. I certainly don't understand why there isn't one single platform across government branches. I could easily come up with a lot of reasons why this save the Government enormous amounts of money. 

This set up definitely divided power between all hiring government branches. However, given that each branch handles their own evaluation of the proposals, I still find little use that the platform itself has to be done in house. Nonetheless, I do recognize the fact that security could be an issue, and if one of the centralized servers crashed it could be bad. There are thousands of hiring processes going on every day across Government agencies, and although delaying them one more day doesn't seem like the end of the world, it could affect greatly already slow-paced institutions. Another matter to take into account is security. Hacking all of the public workers information and also all of the people that have applied, could be done easily, especially taking into account the fact that the Peruvian Government is not very sophisticated with online security. 

Although there are pros and cons I still think even having just one available link that could direct you towards an application could make the process more streamlined. The risks of having a unified platform and preventable. Moreover, the cost of implementation would definitely save the Government a lot of in house operations. The economist in me can only see gains and efficiency. The public-policy-driven-HKS-student in me is very scared about implementing these types of things in developing countries: it sounds like a very typical case of premature load bearing for institutions. 

Expectation v. Reality, always.