On June 14, 2011, the Government of Sri Lanka launched the Integrated National Development Information System (INDIS), a web-based application developed by Synergy for the Ministry of Finance and Planning to manage the entire portfolio of development projects, be they financed by domestic or external resources. The launch was attended by senior government officials, including Dr. P. B. Jayasundera, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Mrs. Malanie Gamage, the Director General of Foreign Aid and Budget Monitoring. Synergy has been working with the Government of Sri Lanka, in close collaboration with UNDP, since the 2004 Asian Tsunami, which heavily affected the country.
In 2005, the Ministry of Planning established the Development Assistance Database (DAD) Sri Lanka to track the thousands of post-tsunami assistance projects. From 2005-2010, the system went through successive stages of evolution, from initially tracking only post-tsunami reconstruction to eventually covering the entire external assistance portfolio. But the existence of multiple related but disconnected information systems imposed a serious management burden on the Sri Lankan government. Therefore, the government decided to establish a truly integrated enterprise Monitoring and Evaluation information system that would provide a complete picture of government performance and national development. Indeed, INDIS goes beyond project monitoring; it also helps assess the performance of ministries and sectoral developments, as well as being a searchable e-registry of all project evaluations.
The INDIS is, at its core, a decision-support tool designed to enable policymakers to assess project performance and results in real-time and take decisions on corrective actions and resource allocation. And its establishment comes at the right time, as the government has recently rolled out a number of key capital investment projects in water resources, energy, and road development.
A major part of the INDIS project was to integrate various government information systems into one unified system to achieve efficient information management, coupled with advanced analytical and reporting capabilities. In his remarks during the launch ceremony, Dr. Fredrick Abeyratne, Senior Programme Analyst of UNDP, thanked Synergy “for doing a wonderful job of integrating systems…and adding new features.”
