Many IT facilities are in similar sad state of disrepair
Malaysia The Star daily recently reported that millions (of Ringgit or RM) go down the drain when most of the 1Malaysia futsal court facilities around the country were left unattended for long time and is in a sad state of disrepair. It was reported the crew visited more than 100 of 1Malaysia futsal courts around Selangor, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Johor, Perak and Kedah. Many were found neglected with some clearly never having been maintained since the day they were constructed.
According to the paper there are 2200 (later was corrected by official there are about 646 futsal courts and the rest are multi-purpose halls) 1Malaysia futsal cum basketball courts that have been built around the country for the community at about RM150,000 (app. US$46,000) each since 2009 as part of Youth and Sport Ministry’s noble initiative to promote futsal, basketball and other sports among youngsters.
This interesting report caught my attention and also sparked some discussions on social media. I’m not a futsal player and did not really check any of these facilities. However if we ponder a while and look around us, it is not difficult to uncover many IT projects/facilities that faced the similar faith.
Ironically (for the benefits of those that are unaware), any facilities (regardless of futsal courts or IT labs with hardware and software) need ongoing up-keeping to ensure the facility is always in proper working condition. From IT perspective, this refers to maintenance or upgrade of computer hardware, storage, software version, etc. It does not take a genius to figure out that a sudden rush of adrenaline to allocate development expenditure (DE) funding to build but forget about the on-going operation expenditure (OE) funding is the culprit behind these failures. Initiating an IT capital expenses (CAPEX) project without proper care given to aspect of on-going ownership, managing, maintaining and operating cost (OPEX) is not sustainable. Bottom line, expecting the IT system to continue operating indefinitely at optimum level but without on-going maintenance allocation is just not realistic.
Back to the 1Malaysia futsal court issue, according to the daily, there is no plan by the Sport and Youth Ministry to repair the damaged courts, as it will cost about RM18.7 million annually and the ministry failed to get funding from Economic Planning Unit (EPU) for the repairs.
Again this is nothing new to us. As IT savvy Malaysian, we are used to see many agencies have to abandon their aged IT systems after a once upon a time glorious official launch of the then state-of-the-art system due to lacked of maintenance. No wonder we are famous with first world infrastructure but third world maintenance. Malaysia Boleh ! (Loosely translated as Malaysia Can Do, or Malaysia Capable – a common slogan in Malaysia to instil never give up attitude).
Simply MY GIS - GIS from Senior Executive Perspective 