Make no mistake. MySejahtera is a well-chosen name for a public health app.
One of the meanings of sejahtera is being at peace with oneself. If recent glitches and several others in the past are any indication, MySejahtera is anything but a peace-inducing app.
News reports, letters, screen shots and social media chatter are a central bank of national angst. Now that MySejahtera is two years into its business, it is only fair to ask: is it being well-run? Do not get us wrong.
The app has indeed played a crucial role in helping the government in managing public health.
Health assessment, the vaccination process and the regulation of people's movement have been made easy by the app. But issues are aplenty.
We think MySejahtera can do way better. There are two reasons for saying this.
One is technical and the other organisational. Start with the technical challenge the app seems to be facing. Every now and then.
Granted, no app is glitch-free. But there are good apps and bad apps. A good app is one which fails infrequently.
MySejahtera's glitches have surfaced too often to be termed infrequent. It shouldn't take this recurrence lightly as some have serious consequences.
Consider the "Home Surveillance Order" and "Person Under Surveillance" status. People who are issued such orders are those who have tested positive for Covid-19, or have come into contact with one.
Yet, for some reason, that remains unexplained to this day — not long ago, some people were issued with the status even though they were neither.
MySejahtera can't afford to bar people from public places like this. Or deny them the right to travel. We suggest a revisit of the app as the glitches are one too many. Now for the organisational challenge. It is at MySejahtera as an organisation that the nation's fury is mostly directed. And rightly so. Take the issuance of a vaccination certificate. Ewe Hai Heng's daughter had her second vax on Oct 10 last year in Penang, and there was no update on her digital certificate. Hours turned into days, and days into weeks, and weeks into months. For the mother and daughter, it was "nine frustrating weeks" of dealing with the digital and brick-and-mortar versions of MySejahtera. On Dec 15, she went national with fury through a letter to this newspaper. We headlined it: "9 weeks of frustration due to unresolved MySejahtera glitch". There have been other "please help" cries like this.
Organisations come in two types: healthy and unhealthy. A healthy organisation will never allow an issue to explode into a crisis. It will manage it when the issue is just a murmur. There is neither a technical nor organisational logic for MySejahtera to take 63 days to resolve the digital certificate problem. Warren Buffett, the occasional management guru, is right. "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about it, you will do things differently." MySejahtera needs to do things differently. Try communicating more. To the people and the press. Being media savvy helps. People need to know why glitches happen and what is being done to resolve them. Remaining silent only leads to speculation. Speculation is a reputation destroyer of the very dangerous kind. Helpdesk is, well, helpful. But what is the point of it when a query goes unanswered for the umpteenth time? Try harder.