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South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency (SITA ) is focused on enabling government to transform service delivery to citizens through innovative use of information and communication technologies.

The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) opened its doors for business for the first time on 4 April 1999. This year, SITA celebrated a decade of its existence as a strategic resource for government, to consolidate and co-ordinate the state’s IT resources.

The work of SITA is to leverage ICT as a strategic resource to enable government to improve service delivery and to meet the challenges faced by a developmental state.

Its raison d’être is to modernise systems and processes, improve government’s service delivery capacity, enhance citizen access, ensure economies of scale and enhance black economic empowerment through the smart use of ICTs.

The heartbeat of the organisation is to ensure standardisation, uniformity, interoperability, security and intelligibility in government systems. The ongoing transformation and re-engineering that is driven by a citizen–centred approach is at the heart of SITA’s work.

In SITA’s execution of its ICT role, the organisation explores innovative ways to leverage technology for creative, effective and cost-effective solutions, and also researches, pilots and runs valuable projects to promote good governance, accountability and enhanced service delivery.

SITA’s principles around innovation, transformation, skills development and collaboration growth, and sustainability, have been the foundation on which its achievements over the past 10 years have been grounded.

SITA’s service delivery evolution

SITA’s evolution and development as in institution is fuelled by innovation. Committed to its mandate of establishing an optimised ICT infrastructure to modernise public service operations, SITA has been instrumental in e-government initiatives.

The first leg of the e-government initiative was kick-started in 2004, with the deployment of the first phase of the Batho Pele Gateway, which provides comprehensive information about government services.

Noting that a citizen-centric approach to service delivery is essential, e-government must move beyond online information to fully transactional, citizen-centric and personalised services that deliver the value add that citizens expect. This is a core priority for the organisation at this juncture.

In March 2007, SITA worked with the Department of Home Affairs to establish the Identity Document Track and Trace SMS System. The system notifies applicants of the status of their applications. In addition, applicants can also automatically query the status of their applications using an SMS facility.

Furthermore, SITA has established the e-Government Centre of Excellence and is committed to the continuous improvement of its e-government strategy. Established in August 2008, the Centre of Excellence serves as a body of knowledge on South African e-government to position SITA as an e-government advisory service to government. SITA aims to provide access to government services, and to ensure that those services are citizen focused and beneficial.

Key to SITA’s operations is providing government with relevant and customised services, and as a result, a key achievement in the 2008/09 financial year, was the development of a SITA Product and Service Catalogue. The catalogue contains over 200 services, costing models and definitions for the operations of each service and is further tailored to meet government department’s needs and expectations.

Commitment to Excellence

During 2007, SITA established a fully functional Quality Management Department to lead and guide the organisation to realising a fullyfledged Quality Management System.

During the same year, auditors from the South African Bureau of Standards conducted an ISO 9001 certification investigation at several offices and locations as a first step towards embedding quality management in SITA.

The outcome was positive, with SITA receiving a recommendation for ISO 9001:2000 certification from the ISO certification board in Europe.

SITA received this international certification for the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal regions, the Department of Defence project office in Cape Town, as well as SITA’s headquarters, which combines its Erasmuskloof, Perseus Park, Centurion, Numerus and Beta offices.

SITA improved on this achievement in the last financial year and received the ISO 9001:2008 certification for the entire organisation, ie, its national and all regional offices.

The ICT House of Values aims to reduce ICT costs for government, improve government’s efficiency and effectiveness and make it convenient for citizens to access government services. To achieve this, government needs to have a view of all the processes, ICT products, services and projects, in order to: • Reduce duplication – ensure reuse and sharing of existing solutions; • Leverage economies of scale – procure ICT products and services for government centrally; • Ensure that all products and services are secure; • Ensure that all ICT solutions within government can integrate/ interoperate; and • Empower the previously disadvantaged by: - Providing them with access to economic opportunities; - Providing them with a cost-effective way of accessing government services via different channels – anywhere, anytime, anyhow; and - Providing them with training and overall skills development to understand and to use the different channels available to them to access government services.

SITA’s contribution to government modernisation is undisputed. A case in point is the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) project. The IFMS is a multi-stakeholder programme of National Treasury, Department of Public Service and Administration and SITA, to consolidate and renew government’s back-office applications. The scope of the project covers financial management, human resources management, supply chain management, asset management and business intelligence across both national and provincial departments. As such, it constitutes the biggest integrated business solution undertaking in the country.

The IFMS will operate on an open standards platform and will support government’s reformed procurement processes.

A key spin-off for the IFMS programme will be its contribution towards creating capacity and enhancing South Africa’s technology skills base, while supporting SITA’s transformation as a Prime Systems Integrator.

Supply chain management is an area that is crucial to good governance. In 2007, SITA’s procurement function was reorganised under a new division: Regulatory Affairs and Procurement. This strategic shift highlights the organisation’s commitment to good governance.

Currently, the organisation is working on a new procurement strategy that takes into account key issues and priorities emerging from government and stakeholders, such as the need for local economic development and strengthened procurement processes and procedures.

Government service delivery support

The establishment of a provincial nerve centre for the Office of the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal is an example of strategic services rendered to provincial government. The nerve centre is an automated and integrated IMS, aimed at monitoring and tracking government service delivery in the province. The nerve centre epitomises the ideals of a modernised public service in which speedy and automated access to information will improve service delivery in line with the Batho Pele principles.

SITA is currently working on piloting a Poverty Index for the City of Johannesburg to ensure a composite view of the citizens that it serves and to enable the municipality to track human development in the area. The National Departments of Housing, Social Development and Health, as well as the Unemployment Insurance Fund are key participants in this government-wide information exchange project.

In collaboration with the Department of Education, SITA implemented the Learner Performance Tracking System, which covers 28 000 schools and contains more than 12 million individual learner records per year, and will track the performance of learners throughout their school career. This national tracking system has been designed to meet the needs of schools with different levels of ICT capability, and caters for scenarios with paper-based school record keeping systems, computerised school administration packages, and for those with no Internet connectivity.

The expansion of SITA’s service footprint in the local government sphere has gained momentum and a Municipal ICT Blueprint has been completed. In 2008, SITA also identified a Health Information System for a few hundred municipal clinics that currently only have manual systems. This project has the potential to be combined with the Mobizen technology to allow health workers to access patient records at clinics while doing field work.

Finally, in the last elections, SITA managed the call centre for the Independent Electoral Commission in preparation for the 2009 national and provincial elections. These are some of the examples of work done.

ICT development and leadership

SITA has made significant progress in creating a platform for thought leadership on ICT for the public sector. By engaging in strategic sessions and forums with government and industry partners, SITA has positioned itself as a leading role-player in ICT, while at the same time recognising the respective competencies, capacities and expertise resident within these sectors.

Besides the stakeholder engagement forums, where SITA engages with government and industry players, the inaugural GovTech event in 2006, as well as GovTech 2007 and 2008, served as important catalysts in government and industry engagement.

The total delegation has grown phenomenally, by approximately 100%, from 1 000 cross-sectoral delegates in 2006 to close to 2 000 in 2008. The conference has set the benchmark for what has become the pre-eminent South African ICT conference focused on collaborating on ICT solutions, to align public service delivery with policy outcomes.

A countrywide challenge, shared by both the public and private sectors alike, is the skills shortage affecting the ICT industry. In 2006, SITA championed the establishment of a virtual ICT Skills Academy that would help in developing critical skills. In order to create a well-designed virtual ICT Skills Academy, SITA collaborated with strategic cross-sectoral partners. The academy develops training courses in collaboration with established tertiary institutions, based on the required need, and delivers the programme as part of a specified degree.

Given the significance of the move to free open source standards accepted by government, in the 2007/8 financial year, the academy started creating capacity on an OSS skills development programme for ICT graduates. The graduates have completed their classroom training and have commenced with the practical training under the SITA Free Open Source Standards Programme Office, to support the organisation’s migration to an OSS platform.

SITA’s Youth Internship Programme (YIP), established in 2002, is a flagship programme. Providing young ICT graduates with the one-year internship of intensive theoretical and on-the-job training prepares graduates to meet the current demands of the job market and readies them to be easily absorbed into either the government or private sectors.

YIP places special emphasis on targeting youth from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, especially young women, and ensures that trainees have a nationwide spread, including remote locations. To date, over 1 500 youth have been trained under the programme, and 52% of these include women.

SITA: The road ahead to the next 10 years

Fuelled by the experience, achievements and successes of the past 10 years, SITA is committed to become a high performance ICT service provider of choice for the public sector. Going forward, a key priority for the organisation will be to meet the expectation and needs of its stakeholders, partners and clients. SITA will continue to strive towards creating shareholder value by delivering the highest levels of customer, employee and community satisfaction.

Given the lessons learnt, challenges met and overcome, and the successes registered, SITA at this historical juncture is positioned to become a high performance and innovative organisation with the requisite capability, competence and capacity to meet the ICT requirements of government.