Improving public sector service delivery: a developing economy experience

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Emerald in International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management on 10/09/2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-05-2017-0129 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The Pension Trust Company (PTC) in Ghana is the sole agency responsible for the management of the first-tier pension scheme as well as processing of claims submitted by beneficiaries for this scheme. The claim processing system at PTC was wrought with significant delays resulting in severe customer dissatisfaction and hardship to retirees. Hence, a new system – Age 54+ project – was developed to address the problems related to claims processing. The purpose of this paper is to report on the efficiency gains from the new claim processing system implemented at PTC and to use the philosophies behind the lean operations concept to explain the results. Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were obtained from the benefits system of PTC for the period 2009–2013. The data consist of a series of benefits processing time for two groups of 56,000 claimants – those cleared under the Age 54+ project and those cleared under the old processing system. The processes of the two claim processing systems were analysed and their processing times compared. Findings: The new system – Age 54+ – decreased the average processing time for new claims by 20 per cent. The new system is a simple approach which is driven by a “Let’s Start in Time” idea. Originality/value: The operations management literature suggests that process redesign approaches and the implementation of continuous improvement techniques represent mechanisms for achieving performance improvements at governmental agencies. This study shows and discusses the redesign of a social security scheme process using a lean operation concept of waste elimination method and application of kanban to deliver performance improvement.Published versio

Enhancing Privacy in Wearable IoT through a Provenance Architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) is inspired by network interconnectedness of humans, objects, and cloud services to facilitate new use cases and new business models across multiple enterprise domains including healthcare. This creates the need for continuous data streaming in IoT architectures which are mainly designed following the broadcast model. The model facilitates IoT devices to sense and deliver information to other nodes (e.g., cloud, physical objects, etc.) that are interested in the information. However, this is a recipe for privacy breaches since sensitive data, such as personal vitals from wearables, can be delivered to undesired sniffing nodes. In order to protect users’ privacy and manufacturers’ IP, as well as detecting and blocking malicious activity, this research paper proposes privacy-oriented IoT architecture following the provenance technique. This ensures that the IoT data will only be delivered to the nodes that subscribe to receive the information. Using the provenance technique to ensure high transparency, the work is able to provide trace routes for digital audit trail. Several empirical evaluations are conducted in a real-world wearable IoT ecosystem to prove the superiority of the proposed work

Occupational dose assessment for radiation staff at nuclear reactor research centre, 2011 – 2015 (prior to core conversion)

Radiation absorbed dose data of staff at the Nuclear Reactor Research Centre (NRCC) of Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, from 2011 to 2015, was analyzed to evaluate the performance of personnel monitoring program prior to the reactor core conversion, and to set baseline criteria for compliance after the core conversion. Personnel radiological deep dose data Hp (10) and surface dose data Hp (0.07) of three radiation workgroups, each of 4 wor-kers were extracted from Thermolumiscent Dosimeters (TLDs). The reactor dose rate data from coolant water was used as control factor influencing radiation absorbed by the staff. The mean dose rate values were respectively, 0.56 mSv and 0.48 mSv for Hp(10) and Hp (0.07), which were very low compared to the annual occupational limit of 20 mSv/year averaged over any 5-year period set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Statistical analyses were performed using Repeated Measure Analysis of Variance, Multivariate Analysis and Mauchly test. Significant differences were found in both Hp (10) (F(11, 36) = 7.45, p < 0.05) and Hp (0.07) (F(11, 36) = 4.51, p < 0.05) per year, however, no significant differences were found among the three workgroups. The dose data showed reduction in personnel radiological dosage over the five-year period, indicating either effec-tiveness of radiological protection program, reduction in reactor power due to burn out of nuclear fuel after 20 years of operation or reduced staff workload.Keywords: Occupational Dose, Thermolumiscent Dosimeter, Effective Dose, Personnel Monitoring, Analysis of Varianc