Outdated systems hinder service delivery
SOUTH African government departments are facing the challenge of transforming themselves into lean service delivery agencies, and a similar thing is happening globally. This is a huge task that is hindered by the complexity of a conglomeration of outdated systems that cannot communicate with each other, says Alf Kale, executive director of public services at SAP.
With these islands of technology it is impossible to get an end-to-end view of processes and difficult to collaborate on projects, says Kale.
Government has a roadmap for modernising its systems to improve service delivery. Once operations are streamlined, departments will be able to collaborate and operate flexibly.
He says the government can benefit from the experience multinational suppliers have gained from involvement with other government installations.
These suppliers have accelerators and templates for fast tracking implementation.
There is still much work to be done with front office, customer facing systems and processes, especially in higher education and research, public health, social services, safety and security and defence, says Kale.
“We are seeing islands of progress with front-office systems.”
These include case management systems in the police department and social services, and border-control systems.
Martin Rennhackkamp chief operating officer at PBT, says the government is similar to a large corporation in that it needs to have good information about what is going on internally and about its customers — the citizens.
“Without a rounded view of the population and the means and needs of the people it is hard to deliver good service.”
He says in the public sector each department only sees individual citizens in terms of its own dealings with them.
“Some departments do not even know that certain individuals exist.”
Business intelligence tools should be used to gather information from different systems to obtain a full view of each citizen across all departments. They will provide a complete picture of day-to-day activities across different departments and analyse conflicting or complementary influences.
“For example, planned road maintenance will affect public transport and traffic flow and this in turn could affect police and emergency services.”
Business intelligence tools can also be used to analyse and predict what services are needed to support an event such as the 2010 World Cup, and plan how to maintain existing services during this period.
“The two will need to be supported in parallel.”
Similarly, too much focus on the Gautrain project could cause other public transport requirements to be neglected.
“Business intelligence provides a good mechanism for highlighting exceptions that need attention.”
Aggrey Rantloane, head of public sector at Cisco SA, says the government is committed to building a communication infrastructure but is facing challenges such as lengthy tender processes and a lack of skills.
“For example, SITA (the State IT Agency) is rolling out a next-generation network and needs a lot of skills for this.”
The SITA network consists of a national fibre infrastructure that will link government departments to each other and has the potential to support voice, data and video content.
As the IT arm of government SITA provides managed network services to government departments. Some departments are already starting to link to the new network infrastructure, which will play a pivotal role in service delivery even in remote areas, says Rantloane.
With the infrastructure in place, SITA must prioritise which entities need to be connected to the network.
He says education and health care are high priorities, but so is the communications infrastructure needed to support 2010 world cup requirements.
“For example, a government tender has been issued for a call centre to link with the police and hospitals to deploy emergency services quickly for 2010.”
This will require linking the participating entities at local, national and provincial level.
Provincial departments are embracing broadband communication technologies to support 2010 initiatives in the short term and provide citizens with easier access to services in the long term.
At local government level six municipalities have implemented their own fibre networks that will provide a communications infrastructure over which to deliver services, says Rantloane.
Loading ...