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Correctional Services identifies IT crisis

Farzana Rasool
By Farzana Rasool, ITWeb IT in Government Editor.
Johannesburg, 26 Oct 2011

The Department of Correctional Services (DCS) has received qualified audits for the past seven years, and the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee largely attributes this to the IT unit in the department.

For this reason, committee chairperson Vincent Smith said at a meeting concerning the DCS's IT unit last week that the department is in a crisis situation.

He explained that it is inconceivable to think of something like a hospital, a hotel or a school running without an effective IT system, yet the DCS is in exactly this position.

Vacant

Smith said the department has never had a clean audit, largely because of inadequacies in IT services.

The DCS Annual Report for 2010/11 indicates that the department had been granted R270 million for computer services and R1.1 billion for consultancy fees.

The chairperson said this needs to end, because if the entire DCS is run by consultants, there is a political rather than an administrative problem.

He noted that there is almost a 100% vacancy rate in IT, with the majority of the posts occupied by consultants. Smith said the Auditor-General would have to intervene.

Rickety relationships

Acting DCS IT officer Jeff Moji noted the existence of high-level challenges.

Firstly, there are strategic challenges, due to the lack of effective governance and accountability for IT applications, and there are multiple security technology stakeholders at correctional centres.

The infrastructure is not properly planned, deployed and managed. There is no effective management and strategic reporting. There is also a lack of application integration and development is taking place in silos, without any centralised policy, and therefore no adherence to standards.

There are no user application tools for management reporting and data interrogation, and there is a general lack of IT service management across the entire organisation.

The operational challenges include the fact that data islands have different types of data, and data integrity is lacking. Also, there is reliance on “rickety relationships” with service providers.

There is excessive manual intervention and lack of hands-on training on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and IT applications in general. IT human resources are not properly co-ordinated for the good of the entire department.

Moji also said the network is far too old to be efficient. It has not been upgraded for the current load. There is insufficient security in place, no management of network devices, no standardisation on equipment, and the current network equipment is ailing.

The acting IT officer also said network cables are constantly being stolen, with the result that it is impossible to do automated back-ups, so databases are not being updated.

Millions wasted

There are also infrastructural challenges. About 800 servers across the department are very old and needed to be replaced.

There are about 360 firewall servers across the country, but 200 of them are not operational, meaning the entire network of the department is open to sabotage.

The Disaster Recovery Plan that was initially reported to the National Commissioner as being on track is actually not yet in place.

Server rooms across the country do not meet safety and security standards; some IP cameras in server rooms don't have maintenance contracts; and about R37 million has been spent on automated back-up equipment, yet most of it does not work due to the server rooms not being suitable for housing such delicate machines.

The e-mail environment is highly unstable and regularly shuts down, due to the department's infrastructure and the State IT Agency's (SITA's) poor wide area network (WAN) services.

Dodgy officials

There are also human resources challenges. The head office of the DCS in Pretoria has 18 IT officials, comprising one director of Systems Development, and four deputy directors, but the rest are extremely junior officials and mostly administrators.

Moji said the four deputy directors have limited experience in IT technical matters, and rely mostly on consultants. The director of Systems Development and the deputy director of Information Security have been suspended. The deputy director for Networks has been dismissed and is currently being charged with child pornography.

At the beginning of the financial year, head office had about 83 IT consultants and another 50 consultants doing systems development on a special project.

Some consultants were found by the AG to have been contravening procurement processes, and were dealt with accordingly.

SITA improvement

Moji noted that the DCS has to go back to basics. It must focus on infrastructure renewal, developing IT skills, structural improvements and establishment of secure IT systems.

There is a need to work on IT as an enabler through business support and work must be done on IT as a strategic partnership, with a focus on forecasting, offender management, cyber crime intervention and IT programmes for offender rehabilitation.

Moji said the DCS has now budgeted about R20 million for integrated systems.

There is a need to reduce the number of consultants, while minimising the risk of sabotage to systems and services.

There is a need for improved delivery by external service providers, especially SITA.

In respect of IT governance, he noted that various positions have been advertised and hiring is already happening, for some of the posts. Thirty consultants had been released on 15 June and this resulted in annual savings of R25 million from August.

Another 50 consultants are still on board, but because the DCS is heavily dependent on them, they cannot be removed until new systems are implemented. The department's target is to reduce by 10 more consultants by the end of the financial year.

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