On the “Teacher” board of Professional Technology Temple (PTT), the nation’s largest online bulletin board system, the director of Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School’s library recently complained that the school had been trying since June to recruit two “supply teachers” to supplement its information technology (IT) department.
To qualify for the job, the teacher-cum-IT-professional would only be required to have a college degree, and would not even need any relevant experience.
There was the added provision that “supply teachers” often become “regular teachers” after two years. Regardless, it took 13 recruiting sessions for the school to find the teachers it needed.
Another comment on the PTT board concerned civil service examinations, asking why there are always so many vacancies every year for the Information Management Center at the New Taipei City Government’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission. Insiders have said that the problem lies in IT civil servants being caught up chasing their tails.
Since the establishment of the Ministry of Digital Affairs in August, public and media discussion have focused on the so-called “Internet army.”
However, they might not know that the problems in recruiting staff experienced by the high school have long existed in most government agencies.
For the most basic information network operations, most government units outsource their networks to private companies.
If a computer software or hardware problem occurs, civil servants are hard-pressed to solve the problem by themselves, and have to turn to the contractor.
However, before they do so, they have to jump through all kinds of loops, gaining a supervisor’s approval, making sure there is sufficient budget to commission the work, and filling out forms as part of a verification process.
The New Taipei City Library network — including the book borrow and return system for its main library and all of its branches — has been the responsibility of a single civil servant over the past few years.
Although each township office has multiple divisions, they can only have one contract-based IT worker per office, whose salary is only slightly higher than minimum wage.
This is why it is difficult for the public sector to recruit IT talent, and why many of the recruits are either incompetent or look for a new job after working there for a while.
In the case of elementary and high schools, teachers can familiarize themselves with their school’s computer systems themselves, but whenever they encounter a major difficulty or a revision of the administrative system, they have no choice but to rely on external help to handle it, or they need to bring in a contractor to provide computer classes.
As government agencies tout their promotion of “digitization,” their administrative concepts and systems are, in reality, outdated.
They are still unwilling to allocate sufficient funds to cultivate their own hardware and software talent. All they want is to get the best service at the lowest cost.
Such IT and information security problems are well known to those who work within the government. With the establishment of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, is the battle between human and computers coming to an end? I am not so optimistic.
Chang Hsun-ching is a former librarian.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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