CRM means votes

By Leon Engelbrecht for SAP

Johannesburg, 22 Apr 2008

Gauteng and SAP are migrating 1 000 social workers from paper, in a multimillion-rand e-government programme.

"At the moment, they have hardly any IT," says SAP Africa CRM solution manager Manti Kleyn. "They are purely paper-based, with paper files and forms, literally hundreds of them."

SAP IBU public services solution manager Corinne Reisert adds this encapsulates the problem most governments face: "It is always the same: everybody wants to provide better service to their citizens, but face budget constraints."

They were speaking on the fringes of a recent SAP-Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) e-government conference. During the event, Department of Public Service and Administration CIO Michelle Williams conceded government's "e-government strategy", was only at "stage one" of service maturity, which she described as the basic capability level.

In a keynote address, she said the concept still held "great promise", but needed rework. "The reality remained that most departments were still carrying our very manual processes and drowning in paperwork - for the most part everything is done manually and this is quite horrifying."

Kleyn says the SAP-GSSC project for Gauteng's social workers fits that bill and will see the 1 000 case workers trade paper for a CRM and records management solution. "To move them from paper to electronic format will change lives rapidly, so we are extremely excited about the project.

"We are seeking to create an environment for social workers that will enable them to focus on what they do best, that is caring and looking after people - and automating the reporting, which has been a huge nightmare for them - will facilitate that.

"Here you can see how a solution like CRM can become a bridge between government and its citizens."

She adds that the social workers are reworking all their business processes and redesigning their forms to take advantage of the new technology. "They are looking at each and every touch-point to improve on service delivery.

"All that information will be immediately available for analysis and to see where there are service delivery bottlenecks."

She says the reporting system will also make it possible to give social workers feedback on the success of their interventions, which "is good for morale".

Government also gains, she says. "The value of CRM is votes. CRM helps governments deliver and that gets them re-elected. I like to say CRM teaches government good manners."