Questions/Answers

The Sectorized Cabinet Monitoring System and Government Report (SIGO) is an instrument that arises from the necessity to monitor the strategic activities from the different government agencies. During the previous administrations there were no record, which made it difficult to asses the programs, made the correct rendering of the accounts and to have transparency of the Government actions. This system allows to follow the progress of the registered activities, that also have a direct impact on the well-being of the state population, thus improving the levels of transparency. SIGO also allows congruence of the government information because all the data must be supported by adequate and efficient Administrative Records. The purpose of this initiative is to keep a strong follow-up of the progress of the activities, so that both budgetary and goal adjustment could be made to the benefit of the citizens. By knowing if the established goals were met in a timely manner, and by conducting the appropriate analysis to determine the impacts of the actions, the correspondent adjustments can be made in benefit of the inhabitants of the state. The goals for these activities are planned within a full fiscal year. Therefore, the annual analysis allow the necessary adjustments to be made in the Budgetary Programs for the next fiscal year. The system not only allows analysis of the progress at the end of the year, but also detects which activities are not going to reach their goals. These defections allow the Government Agencies to restructure the programs to reach the final objective. In other words, this system allows a constant feedback on the Government actions.

SIGO helps the Government Institutions to be more efficient to achieve their goals; but also monitors the how these actions are contributing to the SDGs. The activities that are registered in the system must be aligned at least to one of the SDGs, in which they will contribute to their specific goals. The system is also an instrument to promote transparency in the Government Institutions because all the data must be back-up by the correspondent records and helps in the construction of the Annual Government Report, which is the top document for the State Accountability to the population.

The system aligns directly to the 16 Sustainable Development Goal, called "Peace, justice and strong institutions"; more specifically to the following targets: 16.6. Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels Considering that the system supports institutional transparency by promoting efficiency of the administrative records to support the data and to the constant monitoring of the actions and their respective advances; and 16.7 Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels. The activities that are registered must have information related to the vulnerable population that assist. These characterizations are different from activities, but the most important ones are: - People with disabilities - Women - Ethnic groups The gathering of this information allows to register the impact of the actions in the population that requires more attention from the Government Agencies.

The State Development Plan, base for the government actions contemplates the social, economical, cultural and environmental rights. All the activities found in the system respond to at least one of the above in response of the goals and targets set for the plan. Some actions found in the system contribute to the state economics, such as job creation and the promotion of tourism. In relation to the social actions, the focus is on a better health system, education and actions to help the ethnic groups; and for the environmental actions, there are some for energy, water and environmental resources.

In previous administrations, there was no system to record the advances for each activity, which made it difficult to make evaluations for the programs and determine the efficiency of each action. The gap also made it difficult to asses the institutions work and evaluate the impact of the programs in the population. With SIGO, we have a way to record the data in time, and draw conclusions about the programs efficiency and quality. This helps the decision makers to understand how the programs are behaving in the field and if they are achieving the goals they were created for. With all this information, is expected to make changes to the programs that are not been successful enough. All the information recorded also can help to set a focused group, to help the most vulnerable population so no one is left behind.

Gender equality is one of the biggest topic in our modern world. However, SIGO is not the exception. The activities that are recorded i the system must define their focused population, and all must have specific criteria. SIGO requires for the information to be recorded in how many women and men are beneficiaries of each activity. The information in the program allows the decisions makers to see if there is gender equality when they are talking about goods and services handed to the general public, and identify where there is the necessity to promote more actions to achieve gender equality

The target group is the state administrative personal, which are the ones that run the programs directed to the general public. SIGO has helped the focused group, because they now have a system that allows to keep record of the actions in one place. Also, SIGO helps keep track of the target groups for each activity, which means that the Government can analyze if the activities are actually improving the outcomes for each target group, and in case there are adjustments needed, they can be made in time.

The first time SIGO was implemented was during march 1st, 2013, the system was basic without many information. The old SIGO helped keeping track of the advances of the programs, their objectives and the financial information. However, there was no much information. During the change of the administration in 2018, there was a big change in the system. SIGO had a complete makeover with the information required by the current government. Some of the biggest changes made were. - SIGO has region and municipality information, which is required for every activity. Each program must define targets for the municipalities that apply and keep track of the actions made on each. - SIGO has an alignment to the State Development Plan, which means that the activities contribute to the vision presented in the plan. - SIGO also has an alignment to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda. This was a big step, taking the actions not only at a state level, but trying to contribute at a worldwide level with our actions. - The system registers the advances on the Government Commitments, which are also aligned to the programs and actions. - The system has also a dashboard, design to keep track of the advances and present comparisons between activities. An evaluation was made at the beginning of the 2020, in which the quality of the information was assess. The evaluation had the goal of identifying opportunity areas in which more information could be solicited to be able to design proper analysis. The final development was recently made, due to the pandemic of COVID-19 the system was modified to register if the activity was not stop due to the contingency and to also make changes to the ones that suffer for the pandemic.

One of the biggest obstacles is to educate the administrative department in charge to upload the information about the importance of the new requirements in the system. Most of them argued that the programs were not designed that way, however, a strong statement was made that the programs can be modified to generate the information. The next obstacle was for the administrative department to educate the technical areas to start working on the information required, which actually meant more work for them. Some of them were reluctant, however until today they are becoming aware of the importance of the solicited information

At the time, there was no other system in the region and still there are no systems that record the activities either for the regions or the municipalities in the state. The innovation was that for the Yucatan state, it was the first attempt to have a monitoring system which has proven helpful due to the new circumstances.

The municipalities have taken interest in the system. It is set to make the SIGO even more complex by adding another section that helps the municipalities to keep track of their actions, meanwhile they can create their own.

Technology wise, the language used to program the system is PHP v7. The technology department also used HTML5, CSS3, Javascript. Database is set on PostgreSQL, and the framework is Codeigniter 3.

To our organization´s knowledge, some state municipalities are currently working with our departments to create a version that works for them.

However, there is a lot of potential to transferability and to be modified to keep track of other governments activities. This includes levels such as: - Federal governments (México and other countries) - States governments - Regional governments - Municipality governments The system just need to be adjusted to the characteristic of each different level and state. However, it is important that the government states how they want the information and what information they need to generate for each program.

The resources used to develop the system were: Human resources: the technical department worked on the improvements for the system until they were done Financial resources: the departments pay role Other resources: the equipment (computers) provided by the institution and the office equipment

The initiative is sustainable over time, because looking at the financial aspect, there are no big expenses made. The technical department in charge of the maintenance of the system are also working in other projects, and the people in charge of upload the information are also part of the institutions teams, which are assigned as links between the institutions.

Yes

The evaluation made to the system was focused on the quality of the information that is reported. It was carried out internally, by the Monitoring department. For this, “Terms of Reference” were generated that could detect whether the information that the State Government agencies were registering in the system met the minimum requirements that were established. The evaluation set the goals of identifying areas of opportunity where the quality. With this information, recommendations were made for the agencies and thus have quality and relevant information for decision-making.

In order to carry out the evaluation of the SIGO system, the instrument designed was a questionnaire of 21 questions, in which the questions were dichotomous, that is, they were answered with Yes and No. Each question was assigned a maximum score that could be obtained. Depending on the percentage of activities that fulfilled the question, a percentage of the maximum score was assigned. In the event that no information was available on the question in any activity in the system, it was assigned a score of 0 points. The maximum score was 100 points.

Areas of opportunity were detected that would guarantee the relevance of the information. Thus, it was found that 46 agencies (63.9%) obtained a score between 100 and 80 points; 21 agencies (29.2%) obtained scores between 79 and 60 points and finally 5 agencies (6.9%) obtained scores less than 59 points. From this information we can conclude that the majority of the agencies comply with providing quality information, however, there are areas of opportunity in relation to 36.1% of the agencies with a percentage lower than 79 points. Some of the areas of opportunity that were most common were: - Wrong alignments to the State Development Plan - Lack of alignment with the Basic Budgeting Units - Lack of alignment with the Budgetary Programs - Lack of capture of financing sources - Lack of capture of goals for the municipalities

SIGO is a very helpful tool, because it works between the government agencies, it helps to share information between each other. The Technical Secretariat for Planning and Evaluation of the State of Yucatán is the agency that provides and shares information between the other institutions. Considering the above, all the information registered in the system allows the generation of technical data sheets that are send to the Government Office, and are also share between the agencies. Also, some agencies request information from activities done by other agencies that are related to their own. Sharing information between agencies and institutions is one of the main goals of the system, this is why the importance of having the latest information from each activity.

Asides from the different government agencies, there haven´t been any collaboration with other stakeholders, organizations, partnerships or any type of engagements. The reason for these is that there are still some opportunity areas for the system to be work within the government. However, the Secretariat is open to collaborate with other organizations in order to take de system to the next level.

The keys lessons learned from the process is to educate the people involved, it is a process so there is going to be some people reluctant to change the ways they were doing things before. Communication between agencies is key to everything, when you are trying to achieve goals. The organization has plans to improve the system, as said before. One improvement is to include other organizations, international agencies in the construction of new areas for SIGO. As mention before, one improvement is the addition of the municipality and regional sections that would allow not only, sharing information between state government agencies, but between different levels of government in the state. As a government agency, the Secretariat for Planning and Evaluation of the State of Yucatán, in charge of the planning, monitoring and evaluation of the public policy for the Yucatán state, we are committed to the improvement of the system, and would like to keep growing to make the project one of the best system to keep track of the government activities, programs and actions.