sisira kumara

sisira kumara

Organization Department of Agriculture
Organization type Government/Bilateral Organization
Country Sri Lanka

Working in the Department of Agriculture in Sri Lanka since 1984, now working as the Director (Information and Communication) at the Information and Communication Centre, Graduated in Agriclture in 1982 and having postgraduate in Communication Design in 1996, experienced in implementing ICTs for Agriculture since 2000.

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Forum Towards National E-agriculture Strategies

Question 2

Submitted by sisira kumara on Wed, 05/06/2015 - 19:49

As our experience in the past, there are four main factors directly related to our success or failure of our projects. 

1. People factor; though we have initiated some important programmes it was not sustained due to lack of human resources/ skilled staff involved in. For example our cyber extension project was failed due to non availability of assigned staff for regular updating of the information systems. 

2. Resource factor; there should be minimum resources to sustain our initiatives. In some initiatives, we supplied relevant equipment to start the work, but there was no mechanism to maintain and upgrade the system whenever need. 

3. Process factor; Clear identification of our needs with the processes is more important when plan e-initiatives. In some cases, we failed to identify processes correctly. We should be able to reengineer government processes through ICT's. But in practice, it needs involvement of many stakeholders...   

4. Technology factor; when we start ICTs for agriculture in 2000, we thought ICT technology was the barrier, now we realized other three factors are more important than IT technologies.

I think the proposed strategy guide should address these problems, the policy makers and implementing agencies should be able to analyze and understand their situation clearly. The guide should easily communicate with them to solve their problem.   

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