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EFFECTIVE PRACTICE 

NEW BROOMS TO SWEEP CLEAN?

When President Jacob Zuma announced his cabinet, he said the first priority of the new administration would be to make it work: “Our priority is to make it start working...to make it gel.”
The government department that will find itself in the firing line initially will be Public Service and Administration and it has retained Richard Baloyi as its political head.

Former deputy communications minister Roy Padayachie took on the role of Baloyi’s political number two. Apart from being responsible for implementing the new government structure, the Department of Public Service and Administration also looks after the State IT Agency (SITA), which is responsible for administrating the IT tenders for many other departments. It has its own share of problems, such as accusations of corruption and internal management issues.

All change

Naledi Pandor took over the reigns of the Department of Science and Technology and Derek Hanekom remains as the deputy minister.

Rob Davies took the helm as Trade and Industry minister after having served as a deputy minister in this portfolio. The Department of Trade and Industry is responsible for developing the strategy to attract and develop business process outsourcing (BPO), which has mainly translated into contact centres. This industry sector has proven to be prolific at creating jobs – more than 50 000 in less than ten years.

SELF-SERVICE THE ANSWER? The South African government could vastly reduce its operating costs while improving service to its constituents, by introducing more electronic self-service options for citizens. This is a subject that can no longer be ignored in a world where people are using web-based technologies to get more involved in the political process and to engage with government. Self-service enables government to transact and interact with citizens using low-cost electronic channels that can be made available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a natural extension from using the web as a platform to communicate with the public and is all about leveraging technology to deliver anywhere, anytime access to government, and at a fraction of the cost of relying on service centres and call centres. One valid question that might be asked is: is self-service viable in a country where Internet penetration is so low? The answer is that self-service can span a range of channels – including the Internet, IVR-enabled call centres, cellphones and kiosks. More importantly, self-service allows government to achieve cost-savings across printing and mailing, administration and other operating areas. It also streamlines revenue collection, fault logging, account management and other common transactions and interactions. But self-service isn’t just about efficiency and cost-savings. Citizen self-service in e-government is about moving citizens from in-line to online, freeing them from the queues and frustrations usually associated with government interactions. It also allows government to enter into dialogue with the people it serves through a transparent and easy-to-use interface. Through self-service, government can offer intuitive, responsive and improved citizen touch points countrywide to the benefit of the population it serves. It is an ideal way for government bodies and agencies to gather complaints, queries and suggestions from ratepayers and citizens, so they can respond to their needs.

However, the impact of the global economic recession may affect it adversely. The importance of the department is reflected by the fact that Davies has two deputy ministers, Thandi Tobias and Maria Ntuli.

Public Enterprises has been taken over by former health minister Barbara Hogan. This department handles the largest and most complex of state-owned enterprises such as Eskom, SAA, Transnet and newcomer Broadband Infraco, which is now part of a multination consortium laying the R6.5-billion West African Cable System.

Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma moved from Foreign Affairs to Home Affairs, taking over the department that has been described as the most corrupt and dysfunctional of all.

Home Affairs is in the throes of a major restructuring headed by strong-willed director general Mavuso Msimang. This means revamping the department’s structure, training and IT systems, including the controversial “Who am I Online?” project that has run over time and over budget.

Other ministers who head up departments that will have some influence on public sector IT spending, deployment and policy-making are Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, and Trevor Manuel, who is now a minister in the Presidency responsible for national planning.

MAKING E-GOVERNMENT A REALITY

Moses Mtimunye, the new Chief of Strategic Services for SITA, says he is looking forward to making e-government a reality for all. He believes that the value of e-government lies in the cost reduction for citizens in interacting with government and convenience advantages brought about by the successful deployment of e-government.

“However, e-government cannot happen in an environment where there is disparate thinking and, therefore, disparate solutions. Real e-government is about integrating both the front and back-end of government services across the entire sphere to ensure citizen convenience and access to whatever services they may require using whatever channel of their choice. “At the same time, e-government cannot happen in a big bang approach. It’s essentially about many smaller programmes that dovetail to enable government to better serve citizens, such as the ID track and trace programme, the SARS e-filing solution, MobiGov and so on. These smaller projects underpin the bigger picture that will eventually make e-government a reality. “From a strategic perspective, I believe that we as SITA need to bring the focus back to exactly what it is that SITA does, as we need to be on top of what government requires from a business perspective and be able to translate this into the right ICT solutions to build and implement. We have to be close to the planning process and the thinking within government and strategise around this in order to be able to add genuine ICT value to the public sector.”

Mtimunye believes that SITA also needs to play a strong role in respect of thought leadership, particularly when dealing with initiatives such as the government-wide enterprise architecture, open source software, service oriented architecture and other key ICT-emergent concepts and thinking.

“We need to make this a reality in order to influence government ICT procurement so that we can ensure that all the solutions that are procured can be used to better e-enable government, as e-government holds so much potential in the future of service delivery.”

Facing up to the challenges

Mtimunye indicates that the biggest challenge for e-government lies in providing citizens with an access medium that is robust enough and supported by sufficient bandwidth. “Mobile access is obviously one of the strategies we are working on, and we have been playing around with the concept of m-government. The vast penetration levels of mobile devices mean that this holds a lot of possibilities for e-enabled government services.” Mtimunye believes that if the challenges can be overcome, the benefits would be enormous, for both the public servants and the citizens.

WORKPLACE TRANSFORMATION Accenture suggests that workplace transformation forms a vital component of efforts to take good citizen-focused government to the next level. The five fundamentals of workplace transformation are: • Initiate the change: Establish that change is needed and that changing aspects of the workforce is the best way to go about this. A clear vision of intended outcomes will be a critical lever for stakeholder buy-in. • Design the new workforce: Begin with a scoping exercise and specifically define new roles and ways of working. Clarify new/ amended tasks, assess required skills and develop structure for new roles, along with a job-impact analysis. • Plan the transformation: The right infrastructural supports will include HR planning, planning for consultation with staff and unions and designing a broad programme of communication with external stakeholders. • Implement the transformation: To put steps 2 and 3 in place requires careful orchestration by a skilled and resourced team. Ongoing dialogue is essential, as is an ongoing programme of development and training. • Evaluate the impact and review the effectiveness of the transformed workforce: Reviews ensure that the transformation process isn’t seen as an end in itself. They also allow for improvements to be made and mistakes to be identified.

“It would undoubtedly improve productivity within the public sector, and this improved productivity will ensure that the citizens have more time on their hands to engage in economy-building activities, thus impacting positively on the South African economy.

“The concept of an e-government programme must ultimately be informed by what the citizens want from it, and this must be backed up by the capacity of government systems to deliver to said needs. SITA’s role would be to go out there and deliver on citizencentric projects as may be conceptualised by government departments to ensure that e-government does happen.”

It seems as though the spur of 2010 has at last ignited the fuse under the seats of those with their feet still on the desk and it’s becoming clear that there’s nothing like a looming deadline and the eyes of the world on you to get things moving.

All about perception

The simple reality of the e-government situation is that South Africans continue to favour face-to-face, walk-in interaction, telephone interaction or interaction over the Internet.

Research undertaken by Accenture reveals that the vast majority (64%) of the 9 000 citizens they spoke to worldwide favour this; in South Africa, we’re understandably inclined to see e-government issues from the point of view of the digital divide. It is interesting to note that when push comes to shove, technology is as much about knowing who the Josephine Citizen standing in front of you is when she walks up to the counter, as it is about telling her she can file her tax return online. If more citizens prefer the human touch, government executives need to ensure that their people are able to work with the complex, multi-agency demands that this entails. According to Accenture, this means “fundamental behaviour changes”, since it is vital that “future public service employees need to be customer service experts rather than paper processors or even subject-matter experts.

“Otherwise, governments risk alienating the citizens who have to come through the high-touch channels because their needs are more intense.”

THE GLOBAL VIEW

According to the UN e-Government Survey for 2008, the world average of the global e-government index continues to increase as more countries invest resources in developing websites that are informative. Most countries have e-information on policies, laws and an archive section on their portals/websites. However, it also shows that the gap between e-information, e-consultation and e-decision-making is still wide for developing and developed countries.

For the first time since this survey has been produced, there is a new leader. In the 2008 Survey, Sweden (0.9157) took the number one spot from the US. Scandinavian countries took the top three spots in the 2008 Survey, with Denmark (0.9134) and Norway (0.8921) in second and third place respectively. The US (0.8644) came in fourth.

In terms of regional averages of e-government readiness, there is a clear difference between the five regions, with Europe (0.6490) having a lead over the other regions, followed by the Americas (0.4936), Asia (0.4470), Oceania (0.4338) and Africa (0.2739).

It is worth noting that in the 2008 Survey, there are no countries in the top 35 from the African, Caribbean, Central American, Central Asian, South American and Southern Asian regions. The high cost of deploying a robust infrastructure capable of handling e-government applications is one reason for this discrepancy.

In addition, many developing countries have been unable to fully implement their e-government policies, mainly due to other competing pressing social issues that need to be dealt with in the context of tight budget constraints, such as health, education and employment, to name a few.

South Africa is clearly far off the pace of the top nations, as indicated by the following table:

Regional focus

 
When breaking down the e-readiness of the various sub-regions for Africa, it can be seen that there is a big gap between the West African region and the Northern and Southern African regions. The Central and Eastern Africa regions are close in rankings, with Eastern Africa ranking slightly ahead.

In terms of Southern Africa’s e-readiness, the region has shown little improvement from the 2005 survey. Most of the countries surveyed had a lower ranking in 2005 than in 2008. South Africa (0.5115) continues to lead in this region, followed by Lesotho (0.3805). Botswana experienced a major drop of 29 places, declining from being ranked 90th in 2005 to 119th in 2008. This was due to a lower score in the web measure index in stages II and III. Botswana did not improve its sites from the 2005 survey and with the new questions being added, it did not score well.

As a standout e-government leader in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa has a strong online presence. The website of the Department of Labour (http://www.labour.gov.za), in particular, is an excellent example of a public agency site that is well tailored to the needs of its stakeholders. The website has a very attractive and simple design that allows users to quickly find what they are looking for. The ease of navigation is facilitated by providing users with key phrases, such as ‘Maternity benefits’, ‘Workmen’s compensation’, ‘Domestic workers’, ‘Employers’, and ‘Bargaining councils’.

THREE KEY PRINCIPLES FOR DEVISING A PROGRESSIVE E-GOVERNANCE STRATEGY FOR AFRICA: i) Must be African-owned, combining traditional methods of accountability with modern techniques of e-governance; ii) Must be developed in partnership with the private sector, which should be involved in providing skills training and community-level capacity building, as well as hardware and software; and iii) Must be evaluated regularly in terms of its contribution to more transparent, accountable, inclusive and efficient

Visitors to the site can access helpful guides and legislative summaries on a range of employment related topics (e.g. affirmative action, annual leave and employment contracts, as well as comprehensive labour-market research and statistics). Add to this the various online filings/ registrations available (e.g. compensation claims, employer registration) and the posting of online vacancies, and you have a full-featured site that is a one-stop shop for labour issues.

Africa continues to struggle

Most countries continue to struggle with basic issues of connectivity and information availability.

This is notable in Africa, where that continent’s representation of 14.3% of the global population translates into approximately 3% of the world’s Internet users.

In Ethiopia, for example, the public sector comprises some 350 000 workers, of whom 14% have PCs at their disposal and less than 1% has access to electronic mail. Recent research in Uganda conducted by Microsoft found that only one in every 200 citizens in the country is a regular user of e-mail. Such conditions severely limit the extent to which countries can look to more ambitious e-government efforts.

At the same time, however, no less than eight African nations now have more than 10% of their populations online. Based on both the encouraging experiences of African leaders like South Africa and Morocco (the former leading the world in ICT spending between 1992 and 1999) and broader continental awareness and interest in ICT-driven transformation, there is also room for optimism that Internet- and ICT-driven reforms can yield strengthened democracies, improved public sector capacities and more adaptive governance.

e-Government as a global project?

E-GOVERNMENT 2.0 Web 2.0 describes the trend in the use of technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users; this trend has, therefore, led to the- development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, including wikis, blogs, social-networking sites and folksonomies. However, the real question is whether Web 2.0 is new technology that is a ‘necessary evil’ that government will be forced to adopt, or is it something that should be embraced by the public sector as a new means of reaching out to citizens? The collaborative and inclusive nature of Web 2.0 means that it can be applied in both the front and back office systems within government, with a number of applications in both areas. From a back office point of view, Web 2.0 offers the benefits of regulation, cross-agency collaboration, knowledge management, interoperability, human resources management and public procurement, to name a few. At the same time, from a front office perspective, it can help with issues of service delivery, e-participation, law enforcement, public sector information, public communication and transparency and accountability. The importance of Web 2.0 as part of an e-government strategy is that it provides for genuine accountability, thereby leading to a positive change in the outlook of the public sector, and at the same time encourages citizens to get more actively involved, either by producing content, or by providing ratings, reviews or taste data. This suggests that while Web 2.0 may not be the solution to all of government’s problems – and should clearly not serve as a substitute for governmental IT investment – the fact that its transparency generates the need for government to continuously improve services means it will ultimately lead to more government IT investment anyway.

After nearly two decades of growing Internet connectivity and e-government, there can be little doubt of a persistent digital divide. From one vantage point, the emergence of e-government alone may provide limited reason for optimism in terms of closing the digital divide and accelerating the developmental prospects for the poorest regions of the world.

There are two reasons for caution: first, the overarching domestic focus of e-government agendas in developed countries that emphasise service and performance primarily within their own borders reduces prospects for meaningful political innovation and institutional reforms involving digital technologies and extending beyond national borders; secondly, the absence of any form of direct global policy means that national governments essentially possess a veto over any meaningful project or reform.

Despite such challenges, however, reasons are put forth to justify a more hopeful, countervailing movement toward strengthened forms of governance transnationally. First and foremost, the existence and expansion of a global communications infrastructure creates visibility and coverage that provides at least one foundational element of transnational community formation.

There are many examples of growing experimentation in this regard, as synergies grow between service integration and governance transformation. What can also play a positive role are collaborative initiatives involving non-state actors in developed and developing countries. One such promising example is the notion of a ‘global classroom’ to link together young people from developed and developing nations in a common setting, thereby creating the basis for shared identities and awareness.

One pilot initiative between students in South Africa and the United States has shown that an initial videoconference setting can be effective in facilitating ongoing email exchange as well as opportunities for student and professional interchange. On a more sobering note, however, researchers also found that a widening digital divide also escalates the costs and technical barriers in launching and sustaining this sort of initiative.

NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

Is Batho Pele working?

Government’s ‘Batho Pele’ strategy is designed to enable the public service to serve its citizens efficiently and effectively, although the single biggest impediment to service delivery appears to be an absence of policy and management skills.

The success of this strategy depends on government’s ability to implement it efficiently. A significant gap between the adopted policies and their successful implementation can potentially explain some of the problems experienced with the delivery of government’s main transformation objectives. The need to identify scarce or critical skills and to recruit and retain the skills required is a major stumbling block to be overcome within the public service.

The public sector should constantly change and be susceptible to change, to manage and implement `Batho Pele’. Only with legitimate objectives and goals identified would service delivery be affected in South Africa.

There appears to be some optimism that government is addressing those factors that hamper service delivery. The focus on service delivery needs to be more widely published and conveyed to grass roots in simple and understandable terms. The challenge is to ensure that the under–educated and the poor know where to get access to the relevant service and when the system fails, where they can find a remedy to deal with ineffective or bad service.

`Batho Pele’ enables an effective public servant to provide a world-class service, if implemented and managed according to the `Batho Pele’ regulatory framework. However, it should be noted that the `Batho Pele’ policy can only enable the public service within an environment that is constantly aware of its challenges and is keeping abreast of technological changes and modernisation.

NO SKILLS, NO THRILLS

THE MERAKA E-SKILLS INSTITUTE’S MISSION IS TO: • Provide diversified, unique e-skills education and training programmes • Bring about change by acting as a catalyst to achieve the information society goals • Play a leading role in orchestrating existing and new initiatives around e-skills, and undertaking an advocacy role • Be a stimulus for research and innovation • Enable innovation that responds to the developmental needs of SA society • Work collaboratively to leverage existing capacity and resources

The seemingly innocuous issue of skills and skills development continues to push itself further to the fore in South Africa and, like many other prominent topics, debate has been heated, thanks in no small part to the relationship between skills supply and our political past. At the extremes of the debate, one person’s affirmative action programme is another’s dumbing-down process. Somewhere in the middle lies the reality that integration, co-ordination and IT skills development are central to any country’s success.

Minister for Labour M.M.S. Mdladlana’s 2008 Budget Vote Speech focused strongly on what he described as “The fruits of our Labour” and, to be fair, the National Skills survey for 2007 indicates that much has been achieved. Nonetheless, this clashes disappointingly with reports from the South African Institute for Race Relations indicating one in five Grade 6 children do not meet the required proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. The Department of Education’s (DoE) response that the findings were out of date and, in any case, not the SAIRR’s own work did little to sugar-coat what such statistics could mean for our country’s future.

Meraka – providing e-skills

It has become increasingly obvious that a national programme is urgently needed to achieve large scale improvement in the supply of ICT skills, along with the understanding of how to optimally utilise such skills.

Government’s Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) is focused on fast-tracking the cultivation of 11 sets of priority and scarce skills, and has identified a number of bottlenecks or logjams in the skills pipeline that need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

To overcome these bottlenecks, a new institution is needed that will take a totally new approach to ICT education and training. The institute needs to be in a position to consider supply and demand issues, an appropriate portfolio of offerings, and innovative ways of teaching and learning from a variety of perspectives without the need to defend entrenched opinions. It’s for this reason that government has launched the Meraka e-Skills Institute (e-SI) which has, as its primary goal, the leveraging of existing ICT education and training expertise, infrastructure and courses.

SECURING INFORMATION SYSTEMS As South Africa’s move towards e-government is inevitable, there is one critical factor that cannot be ignored in the drive towards going online – security. Information systems security (ISS) is the single most important aspect of the move towards e-government. Protecting systems and the records and information they hold is vital both from a public trust and a confi dentiality perspective. An ISS framework is currently being developed for all government departments. In order to ensure compliance, regular inspections will be conducted by the inspector general and the Command and Management Information Systems Division of the Department of Defence (DoD). The implementation of the ISS framework will take place under the auspices of the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), with the goal of getting all government departments following the same set of rules. This will make it easier for those government agencies tasked with monitoring compliance, as well as those that assist with security assessments. It will also be much easier to implement changes and updates to the system. The ISS is designed to pick up on changes in the world and feed this information back into the policy in the form of policy alterations, as a means of staying ahead of and counteracting the international ICT threat.

It will, therefore, collaborate with existing institutions and private sector organisations that will partner with it to develop frameworks that include curriculum planning, course development and course planning.

The e-SI will also identify gaps, shortages and mismatches in course content. To this end, the National e-Skills Dialogue Initiative (NeSDI) will be dedicated to ongoing dialogue between the e-SI and a variety of role players in the industry, to ensure alignment between the supply and demand of skills.

Meraka’s vision is to be a key role player and responsive change agent in the development of SA, within a globally evolving information and knowledge environment. It will lead the way in the creation of the appropriate e-skills development strategy, solutions, practices and the implementation thereof, in order to benefit South Africa’s population.

FEELING THE E-GOVERNMENT IMPACT

Making the roads safer

The electronic National Traffic Information System (eNaTIS) was designed to utilise state-of-theart technology that would be compatible with a variety of anticipated system enhancements. It includes specialised transactions designed to limit visits by the public to traffic departments, by allowing for the online registration of vehicles, as well as enabling other vehicle and traffic-related transactions to be performed via the Internet or automated teller machines.

Due to the mainframe legacy technology it operated on, the old NaTIS system was badly outdated. Tenders for the eNaTIS project went out in 2002, and the project was officially launched in 2007. The new system runs on client server technology, which is one of the most advanced technologies available. It works off a common database, meaning that security is enhanced and it is harder for people to fraudulently register vehicles.

The common database means that police are able to use the system to easily trace stolen vehicles, as they can access the database to instantly obtain a full history of a particular vehicle. It also makes life easier for the public, as it is operational across all provinces and municipalities, reducing the need to travel to a licensing department in a major urban centre.

It is also expected to assist the metro police with regards to national traffic enforcement, with the idea being that the common database can, in future, be utilised to track vehicles with outstanding traffic fines.

Since it was launched in 2007, the eNaTIS system has had an availability of 99.9% and, at present, the system processes nearly 2 500 concurrent users and stores some 4.6 billion records on its database. Transaction-wise, it processes some 600 000 transactions daily, or over 13 million per month.

At present, about 20 million driving licence records are on the system and in the near future there will be a lateral payments system up and running. This will enable members of the public to pay online for their vehicle licence renewals.

This, in turn, will help to reduce queues in the various licensing departments. Registration for driver’s and learner’s licence tests will also be available through a centralised booking facility. These are new modules that will be implemented soon.

The Department of Transport is confident that the eNaTIS system will help to reduce the number of road accidents, assist in eliminating corruption within the registration and licensing department and improve the overall standards of driving by ensuring a proper licensing environment for drivers.

Seeing justice done

NEXT-GENERATION NETWORKS AND ARCHITECTURE The implementation by SITA of a Next Generation Network (NGN), which went live last year, provides a platform on which to offer converged services to the entire public sector. The network enables triple play services – in other words, voice, video and data – across a single platform, while SITA is also driving a programme to get the various government departments to share services, with the NGN providing a centralised hosting environment to enable this. There are numerous benefi ts that the NGN can deliver, including cost savings, improved security (thanks to an end-to-end secure network), and improved disaster recovery services. For the man in the street, the NGN and the PoPs allow for the potential expansion of services into under-serviced areas, through the provision of wireless services to these areas. It can also enable connectivity to schools, clinics and so on, meaning education and medicine can be taken to the next level by providing e-connectivity and shared knowledge and services into these areas, thanks to the technology that is now in place. SITA ultimately sees the NGN as being able to facilitate fully connected government operations, including a connected e-government scenario, where all departments have access to all relevant information across the country, thanks to SITA’s central management systems.

It is a fact that the judiciary process in SA can take far too long. With this in mind, the various departments involved in the criminal justice system (CJS) have been working towards an integrated system that will speed it up, while reducing issues around lost dockets and corruption.

Until recently, there was no single way to view the location of a person within the criminal justice system, resulting in the development of the Integrated Justice System (IJS) being viewed as a priority.

The IJS is an attempt by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the SA Police Service (SAPS), the Department of Correctional Services (DCS), the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJCD), the Department of Social Development (DSD) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) to automate business flow across organisational boundaries. Ultimately, the IJS is expected to lead to better management of crime and criminals, from the reporting of a crime right through to the arrest, conviction, imprisonment and rehabilitation of such an offender.

The IJS programme itself is divided into seven sub-sections. Six of the sub-programmes are departmental in nature, focusing on the modernisation of the respective departmental system capabilities. The seventh is a transversal sub-programme that focuses on creating the shared services layer that will enable inter-departmental information exchange and clusterwide performance management information services.

This Integration Hub will enable each department to retain ownership of its own data and to look after its own operations and maintenance, while still linking to one another. Information will be pushed or pulled to the Hub, and accessed from there by the other departments. This will mean that each department will only be able to obtain the information needed for a specific task, and there will be no access to information from another department unless it is required.

The benefits of the IJS are numerous: an improvement in the responsiveness of the CJS; shorter case cycle times; a greater throughput of cases; fewer withdrawals of cases; and fewer lost case files.

There should also be fewer postponements of cases, a reduction in the awaiting trail detainee population, more convictions, an improved prioritisation of cases involving young offenders, sexual offences and other priority crimes, a significant reduction in opportunities for corruption, better management of exhibits, enhanced crime intelligence gathering and improved information flow between internal and external stakeholders.

The IFMS takes shape

Government’s Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) was first proposed several years ago, after it was noted that government’s policy environment had evolved, thanks to new legislation like the Public Finance Management Act, to the point where the existing systems no longer provided adequate support.

A joint initiative between National Treasury, the Department of Public Service and Administration and the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) aimed at modernising and integrating the transverse systems supporting financial, supply chain and human resource (HR) management in the public service, the IFMS has been identified as a convergence priority for all government departments.

THE DOC’S TOP FIVE PRIORITIES FOR THE 2009/10 FINANCIAL YEAR ARE: • The digital broadcast migration, including managing an awareness campaign, and the roll-out of the infrastructure with Sentech and the SABC. • To develop a policy for the national radio frequency spectrum that includes an audit up to the 3GHz frequency. • To develop cyber security policy and undertake identification of critical information infrastructure. • To develop a national broadband policy that will include a programme of action to address the country’s telecommunications costs. • To implement an information society and the development of “hub” programmes that will include a national youth programme, the Meraka e-Skills Institute and the publication of an “e- Barometer”.

Once the goals of the project were clear, SITA was tasked with developing a framework from which to implement the IFMS project that would ultimately enable government to operate on a silo-free basis and provide departments’ accounting officers with efficient, state-of-the-art tools to enable them to comply, hassle-free, with the provisions of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).

Once the project began, it was realised that government also did not have a proper HR management system, so the project scope was expanded to include this. It was then decided to also incorporate Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Business Intelligence (BI) functionality, leading to a total of four main pillars in the IFMS.

The ultimate goal is to develop a cost-effective, standardised and interoperable system that eliminates duplication, offers economies of scale and legal compliancy and enables government to have a single view of all departmental operations. Of course, the main aim of the project is to enhance government’s administrative processes at the back-end, so it is government itself, rather than the citizens, that will experience the real benefits of the IFMS, although the increased efficiencies will no doubt also impact on the man in the street.

THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATIONS

From deregulation to spectrum allocation, unbundling the local loop to digital migration, digital inclusion and making sure the 2010 World Cup runs like a technical dream, the Department of Communications (DoC) has a lot on its plate. After all, the bulk of the responsibility for the infrastructural aspects of South African e-government lies in its hands.

According to Gerda Gräbe, Acting Director-General of the Department of Communications, the Department’s 2009-2012 Strategic Plan has been developed in line with the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) informed by the electoral mandate period of 2009-2014.

She recently told the Presidential National Commission on Information Society & Development that the first strategic goal of the DoC is to enable maximisation of investment in the ICT sector, through development and implementation of ICT policies and strategies. Secondly, it will ensure that ICT infrastructure is robust, reliable, affordable, and secured to meet the needs of the country and its people. This will be achieved by supporting and enabling the provision of a multiplicity of ICT applications and services and modernising the infrastructure.

The third goal is to accelerate the socio-economic development by increasing access to and usage of ICT, by developing partnerships with business, civil society, and all three spheres of government. This will involve increasing universal access, increasing the ICT skills base, facilitating the growth and improving sustainability of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) through ICT, and promoting ICT by ensuring integrated and efficient service delivery to communities.

The fourth strategic goal aims to build an effective informationage organisation that will contribute to the effective functioning of the Cluster and to building a single Public Service. Another goal is to enhance the role of the state owned enterprises (SOEs) as delivery arms of government, and to provide effective and efficient oversight.

Finally, Gräbe says the DoC aims to contribute to the building of an inclusive Information Society globally, prioritising Africa’s development. This involves participation in New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), as well as African multilateral and bilateral ICT programmes, strengthening of South-South cooperation, participating in major summits and conferences and implementing their outcomes, and contributing to an enabling internet environment.

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOME AFFAIRS

When it comes to turnarounds, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has the proverbial turning circle of a supertanker. With several promising projects that feel like they’ve been on the go forever and departmental staffing and infrastructure problems occurring regularly, the DHA has faced more than its share of battles.

While it has been an interminable length of time in coming, the first part of the Home Affairs “Who am I Online?” project was finally completed at the end of April. The project, which has been dogged by problems since the outset, has seen its budget grow to about R4 billion since it was first conceived.

“Who am I Online?” is the controversial DHA integrated business system, which aims to replace all manual processes with online and real-time transactions. A consortium, headed by GijimaAst, was awarded the contract for the project in 2007. In 2008, the project was referred to the auditor-general for investigation, following persistent allegations of irregularities surrounding the awarding of the deal.

The only part of the application that has been delivered so far – as part of a rush to have systems in place by the 2010 FIFA World Cup – is the key immigration systems, such as visas, permits and movement control. This means that the visa application process for foreigners will be simplified. Work on the civic services application is yet to begin.

PLACE OF LEARNING The DoE’s education portal - www.thutong.org.za – continues to offer a range of curriculum and learner support material, professional development programmes for teachers, and administration and management resources for schools. Thutong, which means “place of learning” in SeTswana, features a searchable database of annotated web-based curriculum resources for various education sectors, grades and subjects. It also carries news and information on the latest developments in education in SA, and will give users the chance to interact with experts from the education community, as well as with their peers throughout the country and abroad. Designed as an online community that can work together to help and support South African teachers, its usefulness is dependant on the richness of the interactions between community members. The portal is a free service to registered users, who must go through a once-off , no-cost registration process. Thutong serves as a one-stop SA education policy shop, carrying national and provincial policy documents and legislation, plus amendments, annotated versions, commentary by experts, and summaries.

The initial deadline time set for the roll-out of the project was 31 March 2009. By that date, the system was supposed to have been available in all Home Affairs offices, mobile units and selected hospitals, morgues, post offices and chain stores.

However, service provider GijimaAst says it has “reprioritised for 2010”. This means that civil service applications will only be implemented at a later stage. Work on these applications will begin once the first phase is complete.

“Who am I online?” is designed to provide branch offices and field teams with access to two core systems - the national population register (NPR) and the Home Affairs National Information System (Hanis), which are currently only accessible to officials at the DHA’s Waltloo head office, resulting in delays of urgent documentation for at least a week.

The NPR is a mainframe database containing the identity records of every living South African citizen, resident and deported illegal immigrant, while the Hanis automated

fingerprint identification system contains their photographs and fingerprints. Hanis is used to verify identity and acts as a “guard dog” for the national population register. With the application, DHA officials, border guards and immigration officers countrywide will be able to check identities against Hanis, while the positive biometric verification at DHA offices around the country will allow temporary identity documents to be issued immediately. However, despite optimism in some quarters that “Who Am I Online?| will be a great, if eventual, success, the US State Department recently stated that ongoing fraud within the DHA had negatively impacted the department.

In a report entitled “Country Terrorism”, it stated that border security and rampant document fraud were spin-offs of a badly run department.

According to the report: “South African identity and travel documents generally included good security measures, but because of poor administration, lack of institutional capacity, and corruption within the Department of Home Affairs - which is responsible for immigration services - thousands of bona fide South African identity cards, passports and work/residence permits were fraudulently issued.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

The official National Learner Unit Record Information and Tracking System (LURITS) launched by the Department of Education (DoE) aims to collect the data of each learner in the country and track their movement throughout their school careers. This will enable the DoE to ensure it has accurate enrolment numbers for learners in all schools.

The tracking component of the system will make it possible to identify learners who exit one school and do not re-enter the system at another school, enabling the DoE to identify the individual learners who have left the system and to compile accurate profile of these learners.

The system is a major undertaking as it will contain over 12 million individual learner records per year. Provinces are currently implementing the system in an incremental manner across the country and it will be fully operational by January 2010, with the first national dataset available in March 2010.

LURITS assigns each learner with a unique tracking number that will remain with the learners throughout their school careers. The system should bring about a significant change in the way in which the national Education Management Information System (EMIS) collects information to support planning, monitoring and decision-making in the system.

Currently, the EMIS collects aggregate survey data twice a year from each school and integrates it into a national aggregated store. With the new method of data collection in place, the DoE will house the individual information records of each learner and these will be regularly updated with changes and movements. The benefits of LURITS are as follows:

• Solves the problem of duplicate learners in the system

• Tracks learners who move from one school to another

• Tracks learners who drop out of school

• Ensures the DoE has accurate learner enrolment data

THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION

KEY VALUES OF THE DPSA: • Promoting a high standard of professionalism • Promoting efficient, effective and economic use of resources • Ensuring a development-oriented public service • Ensuring that services must be provided impartially, fairly, equitable and without bias • Building a responsive and participatory public service • Promoting an accountable public administration • Promoting an inclusive public service, denoting a sound demographic reflection.

If any single government department can be seen as the driving force behind `Batho Pele’, the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) is clearly the frontrunner. Mandated to provide the effective and efficient service delivery that is central to the government’s transformation agenda, the department is tasked with overseeing the deployment of ICTs and e-government systems across the entire public service, including its more than one million employees.

Over the years, the department has played a pivotal role in the development of policies designed to revitalise the South African public service, a key aspect of effective e-government frameworks. Applying technology and streamlining to something that is done badly only increases the rate at which you can be inefficient; the backroom processes have to be upgraded if goals are to be achieved.

Long-term view

In his budget speech earlier this year, Minister for the DPSA, Richard Baloyi, said: “We are in a journey for good governance and effective service delivery to consolidate our long-held view of realising a developmental state in proudly South African style, responsive to the needs of our people. Our main focus is to ensure the realisation of a long-held desire of creating a better life for all South Africans, for a better Africa and for a prosperous world.

“We have been on this journey for the past decade and a half and we have achieved the things we set ourselves to do and, of course we have plans to continue to do more. The public service is our guiding map in this journey of rebuilding our country, our Africa and our world.

“The department has gone a long way in addressing the social needs of our people by providing decent shelter, water, electricity, healthcare facilities, schools, social security services, houses, roads infrastructure, the list is long. But more still needs to be done, and we have a plan to do more.

“In punctuating our record of service delivery and rolling out our future plans for effective governance today, we will focus on the work of the Department of Public Service and Administration, the Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy (PALAMA), the Centre for Public Service Innovation, the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), the Public Service Commission, the Government Employees Medical Scheme and the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority.

“I will mirror this punctuated work in seven areas of focus, namely: policy-making, capacity-building, quality service delivery, improvement of conditions of service, partnership for participative governance, further transformation of the public service as well as international participation.

FOSTERING INNOVATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR The key issue in the public sector revolves around how to improve service delivery to the nation’s citizens, and the one sure-fire way of achieving this is through the continual innovation of IT. To this end, the Centre for Public Service Innovation (CPSI) was established in 2003, with a mandate to focus on the development of innovative, sustainable and responsive models for improved service delivery. The work of the organisation is guided by an understanding of innovation as ‘applied creativity that is contextually relevant’. It is the CPSI’s role to provide an enabling environment for people to be creative and to give them the space to dream, according to Thuli Radebe, CIO of the CPSI. “My goal is for CPSI to entrench the concept of innovation in the public sector. We want to develop government as a whole into an entity that is innovative, nurturing and rewarding, at the same time supporting them in this and helping them to overcome any challenges they face around the issue of service delivery. “The role of the CPSI is to act as an enabler, facilitator and champion for innovative ideas. We need to create an enabling environment for new ideas, facilitate engagement between public, private and non-governmental entities, with a view to establishing sustainable and mutually beneficial partnerships, and champion the value of and need for innovation within the public service.” Radebe says that a major strategy of the CPSI is to improve the capacity of government in addressing cross-cutting issues and promoting innovation in the delivery of government’s key objectives by unearthing existing innovation, funding new innovation and providing opportunities for piloting and implementing such innovation. “We achieve this by forming partnerships with the private sector both for research purposes and for financial support, testing and application of innovative projects, and it is for this reason we believe that the private sector has a crucial role to play in public sector innovation.” Another key role of the CPSI is to ensure that the departments involved in service delivery acknowledge IT and adopt it as a great enabler. This plays a twofold role, in that it allows public servants proper access to government services and allows government to take services to the vulnerable communities – such as rural and disabled people – because they can use technology to facilitate better services to the people.

“Through its training interventions, PALAMA also contributes to further deepening the capacity of our public servants to respond with equal strength to the service delivery challenges. If we couple this with the innovations that the centre for public service innovations determines from time to time, we may say that we have a well-arranged public service capable of delivering in terms of the mandate for a developmental state. “In terms of the Skills Development Act, the PSETA is firmly in charge to provide skills development interventions. We have improved the accessibility of services to the people through the establishment of the Thusong centres, which we previously called multi-purpose community centres. In this arrangement, we provide accessibility to services through coordination of structures.

“Our plan this year is to further strengthen the effectiveness of these Thusong centres by ensuring Internet connectivity. SITA runs a programme to accelerate this service. With this connectivity, the citizens would be guaranteed access to information at a click of a button. “Our plan is to ensure that all existing Thusong centres are connected to Internet facilities by the end of the financial year and that, going forward, there will be coordinated planning to ensure that each Thusong centre will be connected as it is established.

“We took a position to improve governance and service delivery through the use of Internet technology, hence the projects e-government and e-cabinet. Once concluded, these interventions will further strengthen our use of technology.”

Pressing on with Thusong

The Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) will press on with efforts to move 100 services online by 2014. Despite previous announcements by the department on plans to provide services to citizens via electronic platforms, recent comments indicate progress has been slow.

Deputy minister Roy Padayachie says that the department aims to develop a prototype to e-enable six online services to benefit the poor. These include ID applications, birth registrations, foster care grants, pension applications, maintenance, and notification of death. Padayachie has emphasised the department’s commitment to e-government services, stating that the six service initiatives will be delivered in partnership with the SITA and the department has declined to disclose a value for the project.

Minister Richard Baloyi has recommitted to the project, emphasising the expansion of infrastructure for improved access to information and service delivery. “We took a position to improve governance and service delivery through the use of Internet technology, hence the projects e-government and e-cabinet.”

Padayachie says the DPSA will begin by connecting 52 Thusong service centres to a centralised ICT infrastructure by the end of the financial year. He said the project would be completed in partnership with Sentech. The centres will be connected through Sentech’s National Wholesale Broadband Network.

The Thusong service centre programme was initiated by government in 1999. The centres serve as one-stop, integrated community development centres that provide citizens with access to information and services in each local municipality. While 1 227 centres have reportedly been established around the country, only 137 Thusong service centres were in operation by the end of March.

While statements such as these are positive, worryingly, former public service and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi announced in May 2008 that 50 centres would be connected to the Sentech network within a year, following the completion of an ICT blueprint for connectivity at the service centres in 2008. This was never completed. Nonetheless, Padayachie insists that government’s vision is to provide every citizen with access to information and services within their place of residence and in each local municipality by 2014.

“The department’s main task is to build an effective state machinery able to support the delivery of key outcomes. The state must be participative, interactive and accessible – easy to reach and responsive to building a caring society.”