The Department of Communications (DOC) has refused to reveal details of the progress of its Public Emergency Contact Centres (PECCs).
This raises concern about whether the DOC will have a comprehensive emergency response system in place in time for the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup.
Following numerous requests for information from ITWeb over the past month, the DOC has failed to provide any information. In June 2008, the DOC said SA was still “on track” to have a single national toll-free emergency contact number in place by the last quarter of 2009 - but has made no information available.
The PECCs are being established in terms of the Electronic Communications Act, which requires the DOC to establish the capability and the Independent Communications Authority of SA to issue the requisite regulations, which it recently did.
The centres will be run as a public-private partnership, involving the DOC and the vendor chosen by the department to establish and run the PECCs. The DOC reported that calls for bids ended in early in 2008 and that it was still appraising the results. Vendors were short-listed and expected to undergo an evaluation process between August and September 2008.
Growing need
The department is envisaged to set up two PECCs, which will consolidate the more than 350 emergency centres handling calls and dispatching for the country's various police, ambulance and fire-fighting services.
The police recently received an unfavourable report on their 10111 emergency centres. The findings of an auditor-general's performance audit of service delivery at police stations and 10111 centres across the country revealed poor performances. The report said the police emergency centres continue to be plagued by system and equipment failures, despite investments in the latest technology.
The police have declined to respond to the report and what measures were being implemented, saying only that steps were being taken to improve their performance.
Delayed project
The DOC has been considering the establishment of the centres since 2002. A pilot contact centre was built at the Strand, near Somerset West, in 2004. That centre handles ambulance calls for the Cape metropole; however, the DOC has not provided any information on the performance of this centre.
The request for qualification (RFQ) phase closed on 29 February 2008, with the tender process opening soon afterwards. Interested parties were requested to respond to the RFQ to construct “one or more” PECCs for the DOC. Vendors that responded to the RFQ process were then invited to tender for the design, maintenance and management and operational services of the centres.
On 6 March 2008, ITWeb reported that several of SA's big-name ICT companies had requested qualification to tender for the construction and running of two of the centres. These included Saab Grintek, Continuity SA, Ericsson, Oracle, Dimension Data and GijimaAst, among others. However, most of these companies have also not revealed any information on the project's process.
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