Johannesburg, 27 Jun 2006
The State IT Agency (SITA) will begin consultations within the next three weeks with selected IT companies over how best to proceed with its Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) project.
About 80 industry representatives attended a SITA event yesterday, in Johannesburg, where the government agency reported on the state of the IFMS project, among other issues.
The companies being represented included Microsoft, GijimaAST, IBM, Novell, Telkom, Symantec, Tibco, Internet Solutions, arivia.kom, Choice Technologies, T-Systems and DataCentrix.
Earlier this year, incoming SITA COO Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo hinted that five companies have been earmarked by the organisation as likely partners in upcoming projects - leading to suspicion that the IFMS may have been what she was referring to.
Maake to lead
SITA has seconded the chief director of financial systems at the National Treasury, Popela Maake, to manage the IFMS project.
"The purpose [of the IFMS] is to set-up back office systems to support all government administrative projects," he explained. The IFMS aims to integrate supply chain management, payroll, procurement, finance, asset management, logistics and other line of business solutions, into a single distributed transversal system.
Maake cautioned that no formal requests for information will be issued yet, but discussions with private sector IT players will begin within the next two to three weeks.
First phase complete
Phase one of the project, concerning initial outline plans and the upgrading of the state's human resources systems, has been completed, said Jonas Bogoshi, chief director of strategic services at SITA.
"Last September, cabinet approved our requests to begin with phases two and three," he noted. In about September this year, SITA will issue a tender for the systems, said Bogoshi.
About 35 SITA employees are working on the IFMS, added Maake, with 15 on the technical side and 20 working on business process development.
He declined to reveal the number of IT companies SITA expects to talk to over the IFMS project.
At this stage, there seem be conflicting reports regarding the exact value of the project, as Bogoshi told attendees the cost would be between R10 billion and R12 billion, while Maake, speaking to ITWeb after the briefing, put the value at R4 billion.
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