Exclusive: Over 50% of Indonesian Cities lack a CIO

Between 50% and 60% of Indonesian Cities don't have a senior IT official, GovInsider can reveal.

The Indonesian Government plans to address this with a new action plan that sets targets for data sharing, complaints handling, and the appointment of digital coordinators. Banda Aceh city has become the first to launch the Federal Government’s new data sharing and complaints handling masterplan, which will be officially launched in June. The city has just appointed a Chief Information Officer (CIO) to oversee this plan.

“Every request to access and analyze data will [now] go through the CIO,” said Husni Rohman from the Open Government Indonesia team in the Ministry of National Planning. Most federal agencies do have CIOs, but cities are lagging, he added.

“At the national level, most of the institutions already have a CIO, but at the local level it is 40% to 50%”, he said.

The second part of the plan is to connect cities with the national complaints handling unit, Lapor. This will allow the President’s Office to centrally monitor the quality of services across the country.

“The cities have their own complaints handling systems, but it is not connected with Lapor. Through the pilot project, we hope complaints from Banda Aceh can be integrated with Lapor,” Rohman said.

The plan will also share cities’ data on the national open data portal, data.go.id. “Banda Aceh has a very good open data portal. They involve most of the local institutions in the portal, who submit their data regularly,” he said.

“But this data is not available on data.go.id, so we hope we can push them to connect with it,” he added. They are also being encouraged to improve the quality of service delivery, both online and in service centers.

Three other cities - Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bojonegoro - will implement the plan next month. Banda Aceh has been chosen first because of the long-running civil war which recently ended in the province, Rohman said.

“The conflict has ended and they are now trying to become more integrated with the national government.”

Also read: Inside Lapor, Indonesia’s Complaints Unit