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E-govt department gets clean audit

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 04 Sept 2017
Gauteng's finance MEC Barbara Creecy.
Gauteng's finance MEC Barbara Creecy.

The Department of e-Government achieved a clean audit opinion in 2016/17, as it strives to modernise the public service and contribute to re-industrialisation efforts in order to take advantage of opportunities offered by the fourth industrial revolution.

The Department of e-Government was established by the Gauteng provincial government (GPG) in 2015 as part of a restructuring process to ensure departments in the province are able to seamlessly talk to each other.

Tabling the department's annual report to the legislature last week, finance MEC Barbara Creecy said this is the third consecutive year the department has achieved a clean audit report from the auditor-general.

According to Creecy, the department procured 49% of goods and services below R500 000 from township enterprises, and did not incur fruitless, wasteful and unauthorised expenditure.

"We are also pleased to announce that we paid 99.5% of our service providers within 30 days," Creecy said.

In the previous financial year, the department continued with its programme to rollout the Gauteng Broadband Network (GBN).

As a result, a total of 1 048 sites have been connected to the network across the province. Half of these sites have been connected to both the wide and local area networks, and this ensures broadband availability in the entire building.

"In the current financial year, we have made R42 million available to assist client departments to achieve end-to-end connectivity," Creecy noted.

As part of efforts to stimulate the ICT economy through skills development, eGov implemented several programmes through strategic partnerships. As a result, a total of 710 training and job opportunities for unemployed youth with ICT expertise were created.

Through the Data Validation (DAV) Centre, eGov supported the Gauteng Department of Education with its Schools Admissions Application system.

This year, the DAV Centre is working on an Integrated Patient Records System for the Gauteng Department of Health, an electronic Wayleave Management System and e-Permit System for the Department of Roads and Transport, and the Open Tender Portal for Provincial Treasury.

"We also established the GPG private cloud to consolidate infrastructure, applications and data to reduce the cost of ICT infrastructure in the province. To date, the department migrated nine departments to the private cloud and the remaining departments are projected to be migrated in the 2017/18 financial year," Creecy explained.

To strengthen ICT security, the department launched the Government Security Operation Centre housed at 75 Fox street. This facility is responsible for the continuous monitoring of the GPG ICT environment, including schools, hospitals and other facilities to prevent such attacks from interrupting the services provided to citizens.

In the previous year, more than 32 billion ICT interactions were processed on the provincial government network, 125 million of these were analysed, with 5 700 security threats found and eliminated.

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