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- The State Information Technology Agency was heavily criticised by speakers at its own conference this week.
- Its new CEO acknowledged the issues facing the government technology provider agency.
- He explained that work is under way to turn things around.
- For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage.
The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) copped a lot of criticism at the GovTech conference it hosted this week, but its new CEO said that change was coming.
SITA - which is responsible for providing technology services for national and provincial government departments - hosted a conference in Durban from 12 to 14 September with the theme, "Platform economy for digital transformation and inclusive growth".
In the opening address of the conference, Communications and Digital Technology Minister Mondli Gungubele emphasised the importance of South Africa keeping up with the pace of global technological development.
He said that South Africa would become an "irrelevant trading partner" if it failed to do this.
SITA is key stakeholder in ensuring government departments are able to access cutting-edge technology.
READ MORE | 'The world is not waiting for us' on digital technology - Minister Gungubele
A number of speakers who represent government departments took aim at SITA over its shortcoming in servicing their departments.
Dr Robert Nkuna, director-general in the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME), said that his department had been nagging SITA for three years to provide a performance-tracking tech tool that the department could use.
"Three years down the line, I still don’t have that, and I wish to believe that the people who are sitting here could have done this in six months.
"If you can’t help us at the DPME, it’s [doubtful] whether SITA can help the big departments," he said.
Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande provided a list of backward technology systems that are still in place in government departments.
"Why do we still give fax numbers and keep fax machines? I am talking about what is still happening. That is your task, SITA," he said.
He added:
Nzimande said there should be a document-sharing system between government departments, so that it would not be necessary for applicants to certify documents they received from government departments.
Zaid Aboobaker, the chief director of e-government at the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), flagged the critical lack of IT skills within government departments.
He said there were fewer than 5 000 IT people in government across 161 departments, referencing internally generated numbers.
He explained that these 5 000 IT people were "developing solutions [for] and supporting 1.2 million public servants".
READ MORE | Governments' critical IT skills shortage: Only 0.4% of public servants work in IT
Leon Rolls, the president of Progressive Blacks in Information and Communication Technology (PBICT), said that small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) are snapping up opportunities to work with Broadband Infraco, which is also a state-owned company, but don’t want to work with SITA.
"SMMEs out there respond to every opportunity that is advertised by Broadband Infraco. SITA is not going to get [applications] until SITA changes," he said.
Working on it
Dr Bongani Mabaso, SITA’s new CEO, acknowledged the challenges the agency has faced and said that SITA would be taking a new approach going forward.
Mabaso said that the root causes of the problems at SITA stemmed from the speed of procurement, the price of procurement, and the people and culture within the organisation.
"Those are the three areas that are really the root causes of all these issues, [and] there are lots of symptoms.
"At an operational level, we are doing a couple of things. One is we are tying to improve the turnaround time in our procurement space. That’s where a lot of the bottlenecks come from. The reason we have bottlenecks is [because] a lot of the processes we follow are ... manual."
He said SITA had huge procurement volumes. There has been a procurement upgrade at SITA that was completed in August, which forms part of a longer-term plan to automate the entire procurement process.
He said SITA was also getting rid of tender boxes and that the tender process would be digitised.
Mabaso acknowledged the severity of the IT skills shortage within SITA and said it was an "industry-wide issue".
He said SITA was entering into partnerships with third parties to provide technical assistance.
Vision for the future
To follow a coherent strategy, SITA was working with individual government departments to form a vision about what government departments of the future look like and to procure for that future vision, said Mabaso.
"It’s very easy to do piecemeal upgrades on ... things and then after five years you say we spent two billion on ICT but no one sees the benefit of that."
He added that SITA was performing assessments at government departments to build a vision for individual departments of what they would like to look like in the future.
