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Somebody must coordinate the state’s efforts to build a multi-faceted view of its citizens, and provide the necessary safeguards.

Identity is the one fundamental human need, and is especially fraught in SA as we struggle to forge a national identity. Part of the charge comes from the access it grants to state benefits and, given our history of xenophobia; it can also be a matter of life and death.

Identity is also important from the state’s point of view. For one, it enables citizens to earn money, thus providing the tax base on which everything depends. The Minister of Home Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, recognised this when she said: “A better life for all begins with an ID document. An ID enables citizens to access all other social opportunities, including health care and education, as well as social relief in the form of child support and other grants. Citizens are also able to access employment opportunities since many employers require identity documents as a condition of employment.”

‘A single view of citizens’ also enables the state to plan its service delivery. That means augmenting the bare bones of identity with broader demographic information. And there’s the rub.


SILO VISION

The problem is simple to state, and yet so difficult to solve. It’s simply that one part of an organisation doesn’t know what the other parts know. With all its money and resources, the private sector still battles to overcome this problem of organisational silos. Obtaining a ‘single view of the customer’ remains something of a holy grail.

The problem is hugely magnified in the public sector where resources are constrained and the different entities all answer to different political heads. But it’s obvious that obtaining a single view of the citizen would pay huge dividends for government.

“All government is interlinked and an individual citizen interacts with many departments. This information needs to be available in order to facilitate service delivery, and to measure government’s success,” says President Ntuli, public sector lead for HP Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking. “Knowing who its citizens are and where they are based, can help government with its planning.”

To obtain such a composite view, government must link the interactions it has with an individual citizen to a  fixed identity represented by an identity number. Identity numbers are thus the essential first step in any attempt to obtain the single view of the citizen.

BUILDING ON SUCCESS “If we learnt one important lesson from our preparations for the FIFA World Cup, it was the value of breaking the silos and how important it was to work together,” said Home Affairs DG, Apleni. This demonstration of the bene ts of collaboration should help change government’s mindset. “The lack of a working relationship between departments is a problem, but the situation has improved dramatically,” says Home Affairs’ Mmakau, citing the opening of ‘one-stop centres’ that offer rural citizens the chance to access many government services under one roof. “That kind of collaboration is very important.” Accenture’s Jan Bouwer sees the collaboration between Home Affairs and SARS as something that could be built on. “SARS has a good backbone of information but of course it covers only a small proportion of the total population. We should build on it.” Mmakau con rms that the relationship with SARS is both strong and permanent. “Home Affairs and other departments will use the SARS backbone to avoid reinventing the wheel. For example, SARS e-filing can be customised to allow us to offer electronic application for IDs or passports, and its excellent scanning infrastructure can be used by other departments,” he says. Media briefing, 7 March 2011

PROBLEMS  AND SOLUTIONS  AT HOME AFFAIRS?

Basic citizen identity is the mandate of Home Affairs, which has faced severe problems over the past decade or so. Corrupt officials and ineffective systems have been widely credited for lengthy delays in processing applications and poor security – leading in one case to an attempt to extort an identity document by force, and in another to suicide. One grave consequence was the announcement that, as of March 2009, the UK would require South Africans to obtain visas.

It wasn’t only foreign countries that distrusted the South African identity document: “The identity book issued by the Department of Home Affairs simply wasn’t trusted by other spheres of government. And they were right,” says Patrick Monyeki, Home A airs CIO (1998 to 2002).

However, it seems that under Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, one of the most experienced cabinet ministers, and Director-General, Mkuseli Apleni, things are getting back on track.

Home Affairs has often found it hard to ride the technology wave successfully. For example, the department switched from two-dimensional ID cards to smart cards in January 2001, as part of HANIS (the Home Affairs National Identity System) – a move endorsed by Cabinet, which approved smart card as the platform for integrating government services. “The smart card is being piloted during 2011, with rollout in 2012 and 13 – we hope!” cautions the minister.


GETTING THE BUSINESS PROCESSES RIGHT

The Home Affairs identity project has another component, Who am I online? (WAIO), that aims to re-engineer and digitise most of the department’s key processes, together with a significantly enhanced national population register and border movement control.

WAIO has three parts: the development of an integrated core business system to automate Home A airs business processes; the implementation of this system across Home A airs sites here and abroad; and the shared government middleware to be provided by SITA. Gijima was awarded the contract in 2008. Its total bid was R2.1 billion (R1.9 billion for the  first two phases, and R200 million for the middleware).

The project ran into trouble and by 2009, the cost had escalated to R4.5 billion, while progress was slight. The department repudiated the contract in early 2010. Contractual negotiations were handled privately thus avoiding expensive court battles. The end result was something of a triumph for Dlamini-Zuma because she will now get the WAIO project delivered for R2.5 billion while extricating the department from onerous hardware leasing arrangements with IBM and HP.

As part of the settlement, Gijima took a R375 million loss and is precluded from talking to the media.

Because of its history, the name WAIO will disappear, says Sello Mmakau, current Home Affairs CIO, but the project itself remains ongoing. “We have made good progress with the e-government strategy,” he says. “We already interface with several departments and agencies, and have piloted with seven banks. Further interface engagement and implementation is ongoing with other institutions. Home Affairs systems like the National Population Registry, are also being installed in more than 100 high-volume maternity hospitals to print birth certificates for newborn babies.” Initiatives like these see the Home Affairs fulfilling its key mandate as the ultimate repository of identity.

One of the upcoming modernisation projects will be the complete redesign of the outdated legacy systems for the National Population Registry, which Mmakau says needs to be rewritten on a modern technology platform.

With WAIO on the skids, Home Affairs had to pull a rabbit out of the hat to fulfil guarantees to FIFA regarding border control. That ‘rabbit’ turned out to be the South African Revenue Services (SARS), which has had great success in digitising its operations, both at the back and front ends. Working closely together, SARS and Home Affairs delivered the border control system in just a few months, and it worked notably well during a successful 2010 FIFA World Cup all round.


OTHER INITIATIVES

Home Affairs remains the logical custodian of identity in SA but during its travails, other spheres of government went ahead with their own identity projects. Transport successfully launched card licenses using two-dimensional barcodes, and the Department of Social Development is busy with its own National Integrated Social Information System (NISIS) as part of the War on Poverty. According to Julius Segole, departmental CIO and chair of the Government IT Officers Council (GITOC), NISIS is using information from the Home Affairs database and supplementing it with household information derived from field work, as well as from the Unemployment Insurance Fund and the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA).

The project got o to slow start in 2008 and has wasted much time convincing other departments to share information. “It took us just on a year to get one department on board,” Segole laments.

Segole is adamant that this data will be made available to any department that needs it. “Ideally, this type of database should have been compiled by the e-Government Initiative or Home Affairs, but perhaps it’s just too much for any one department to do,” he says. He sees a time when all the information gathered by the various clusters could come together in some common area, perhaps at SITA – although that remains another institution mired in controversy and lacking the consistent, inspired leadership needed to fulfil its mandate.

Home Affairs’ Mmakau has a different perspective, saying that departments have their own mandates and thus might need to gather additional information to fulfil them. “For example, we only capture information about an individual when he or she applies for, or renews an ID. While identity does not change, demographic information does,” he says. “Another department, like Social Development for example, might need more current information to fulfil its mandate. Home Affairs is here to ensure that citizen identity is secure and that the birth certificate is the only way to get onto the Home Affairs systems. What’s key is that the Home Affairs systems and those of other departments can integrate, for example, our technical teams have already met with Social Development to ensure this.”

Fair enough, but the fact remains that it would make most sense for all citizen information to be consolidated – and protected – in one place, provided there are sufficient guarantees in place to ensure the constitutional right to privacy.

INTEGRATED JUSTICE The Justice Cluster’s Integrated Justice System was approved in 2002 to make the criminal justice system more effective by integrating the workings of the various departments. Its success hinges on a single view of the citizen. Progress appears to have been slow given that it needs to create new processes that span disparate parts of the public sector. “They have to build the system first,” notes Social Development’s Segole. Visit http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/justice/system.htm for details.

CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

It’s clear that government is well aware of the importance of a secure, trusted system of citizen identity, as an enabler for both economic and social activity, and as the lynchpin of a programme to deliver services more effectively for less money. And it’s clear that ambitious schemes such as the National Health Insurance will rely on a single view of the citizen to be viable. “Government won’t succeed with the National Health Insurance Programme without being able to obtain a single view of the citizen,” says Jan Bouwer, managing executive for Health and Public Service, Accenture SA.

So what are the barriers?

One is the silo mentality, as virtually everybody one speaks to agrees. Another, says Bouwer, is political will at the very top – too much budget is allocated toward salaries and too little toward infrastructure investment. “SA excels in developing the required strategies to overcome these silos, but still lacks the administrative and political to will to make it happen,” he argues.

SITA’s continuing under-performance is also worrying as it should provide the platform for this sort of transversal initiative.

Segole, speaking as GITOC chair, says another barrier is that many departmental CIOs are not regarded as strategic partners by their departments. “Finance is also a challenge because the skills we need for such a project are expensive and, in many cases, it’s hard to quantify the benefits and so to get funding,” he adds.

Apleni cited infrastructure as one of the issues faced by his department. His CIO, Mmakau, agrees, adding that the problem is government-wide. “Government simply hasn’t invested enough in infrastructure, from bandwidth to uninterruptible power supplies, and that puts e-government at risk,” he says, adding, “But we are starting to make those investments now.”

One of the biggest challenges is policy, and that includes ICT policy. As one of the primary enablers of government initiatives, not just the single view of the citizen, it’s less than ideal that there is no overarching IT strategy across the whole of government. Ntuli points to the fact that the GITO Council has already produced a Government-Wide Enterprise Architecture (GWEA) as part of the Government IT House of Values – but it’s hard to assess how seriously it is being taken across government generally.

Many members of the GITO Council are of the view that the way forward is a Department of ICT in line with international best practice. At a recent GITO Council round table on service delivery, Lemmy Chappie, Gauteng Department of Finance CIO and Deputy Chair: GITOC said: “There is simply no coordination around ICT. That’s why we at GITOC are starting to say that maybe there needs to be a single department that deals with ICT – a Department of ICT that would be able to coordinate all these efforts.”

Segole tends to agree, but cautions that such a change needs to come from political leadership. “We need to begin with the policy-making processes of the ruling party,” he says. “It’s going to be a rocky road, but I’m a stubborn optimist. We’ve shown that a single view of the citizen is possible in the social cluster. If we can get the e-government programme restarted, we must surprise citizens with the amount of information we already have when they log on.”


SO WHO’S THE JUGGLER?

At the moment, there are several initiatives afoot within government that have components related to the single view of the citizen. The good news is that they are being handled at cluster level. The ongoing collaboration between Home Affairs and SARS is also hopeful from a technical point of view, and should be built on.

An important caveat: while the benefits of an accurate single view of the citizen are manifold, there need to be effective safeguards against misuse by government officials who have already shown signs of irresponsibility when it comes to using citizen information.

Government has many balls in the air: now we need a skilled juggler who will be able to bring them into alignment. In the absence of a Department of ICT, it’s hard to see who will be able to pull it off . Home Affairs is the logical choice but it still has to get its house in order and, after all, might not be the best repository of demographic information given its mandate. Perhaps SITA could  fill the role, under the direction of the Government CIO or GITOC? One thing is clear – in order to leverage ICT effectively and to obtain the single view of the citizen on which so much hinges, government needs to come up with a solution – and quickly. We have wasted enough time already.