The Legal Information Library (Library) is a product of the collaboration of Pag-IBIG Fund’s Legal and General Counsel Group (LGCG) and Information Technology Infrastructure Department (ITID). It is an online storage of opinions issued by the LGCG aimed to enable the operating unit of Pag-IBIG Fund to re-use as reference the existing legal opinions issued by the LGCG as it resolves recurring member issues not addressed in existing guidelines.
Background and Problem
The decisions of Pag-IBIG Fund requires legal basis to ensure accountability as a government agency. Matters that are not addressed in the existing guidelines and business rules of Pag-IBIG Fund are referred to the LGCG for opinion. Over the years, referrals from the operating unit to the LGCG involved issues that have been addressed in earlier opinions. It has been observed that the operating unit does not regularly document and share with each other their respective resolutions to member issues. The organizational assessment confirmed this observation and established a lack of knowledge management program within Pag-IBIG Fund.
Solution and Impact
To encourage re-use of existing knowledge, the LGCG came up with the Library project. The aim is for the operating unit to search for legal basis in the Library when resolving recurring member issues instead of submitting them to the LGCG for evaluation. This way, issues will be resolved faster than if it were submitted first to the LGCG for opinion. The target users of the Library are the frontline service personnel in the operating unit who are not lawyers and have no legal background. This underscored the need to make the e-Library user-friendly by introducing features that make the navigation of the site easy, such as: 1) using terminologies that are familiar to the operating unit; 2) uploading the opinions by sector and topic, and providing details such as account name, date, subject, and issue; 3) providing a message board to allow the user to make inquiries about site content; and 4) providing a search box where the user can type in keywords to locate the opinion needed. Training on Basic Case Analysis was also added to the project design. The training aimed to teach the operating unit on how to filter facts from the information provided by the member, determine the issue, and find the relevant material from the e-Library.
Milestones
Within the implementation period, the project accomplished the following: 1) the Library is up and running in the Pag-IBIG Portal; 2) 500 opinions have been uploaded by topic; and 3) four two-day trainings on Basic Case Analysis have been conducted. By March 2015, the Library was up and running in the Pag-IBIG Portal. As of May 2015, there were 534 opinions uploaded. Fifty-seven more were added by June 2015, raising the total number of opinions to 591. Four batches of trainings were conducted entitled, “Legal Aspects of Addressing Member Concerns.” The project also developed a User’s Guide that explains how to navigate the site, what materials are found in each topic folder, which material are printable, and who has access to each category of opinion. Starting March 2015, the site has been accessed by officers from all departments of the Pag-IBIG Fund where majority of whom are from the operating unit. A large share of the documents in the site has been visited at least twice, with the latest opinions having the highest number of hits.
Note: This initiative is based on the Public Management Development Program (PMDP) Re-Entry Plan of Atty. Marites D. Dadulla of the PMDP Middle Manager Class Batch 6 (Bahaghari).