Angolan govt goes digital

By Damaria Senne, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 15 Nov 2007

Local enterprise content management (ECM) firm Digital Archiving Solutions (DAS) is implementing open source software (OSS) digital archiving systems in five ministries of the Angolan government.

The company would not disclose the value of the contract. However, DAS MD Ronald Melmed says his company is rolling out at least 1 000 OSS client licences to five Angolan government departments.

The government departments are: the office of the Angolan prime minister, the secretariat of ministries, as well as the ministries of education, science and technology, and external relations.

Melmed says three of the implementation projects have been done to date. Implementation began in June and will be completed by the end of November, he says.

Content management solutions transform paper documents into electronic data through the use of scanning and imaging technologies, he says.

As the Angolan solutions are based on open source software, government will be able to change them and redistribute them to other users, he adds.

Transformation

Melmed says changing government documentation processes into electronic format has improved staff morale within the affected government departments. "Demoralised civil servants are transformed from paper-pushers into information age workers."

DAS also trains Angolans to deploy the solution, thus transferring skills to the locals and assisting the government to keep money in the country and encourage long-term economic development.

"The heads of the various government ministries we dealt with were particularly supportive of our OSS ECM project as the National Commission for Information Technology, in Angola, has a plan to train local engineers in open source skills."

Melmed adds that DAS is looking to transform its hosted offering infrastructure to OSS. The company runs a scanning and data-capture bureau hosting close to 8TB of other companies` data online in both proprietary and OSS technology.

"The OSS solution works especially well for the Angolan government because it installs in Portuguese and offers a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary software," he says.