IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data will make recommendations to the City of Johannesburg (COJ) on how it can increase efficiency of its ICT systems.
This comes after the company says it seamlessly migrated the COJ's ICT outsourcing contract to its own platform in only one month.
“The process would normally have taken six months, but we understood the city's need for a flexible approach to the resolution of some significant service delivery and supplier problems,” says Dimension Data chief operations officer Alpheus Mangale.
Mangale adds that Dimension Data's infrastructure, including its data centre, enabled the company to take on the extra demands presented by the COJ, especially during the SAP ERP solution implementation.
He also says the company has taken over the entire management of the COJ's IT infrastructure, excluding the SAP environment.
Long-term strategy
“The use of Dimension Data's next-generation platform enabled on-time and on-budget roll-out of the billing application from SAP, taking the strain off the city's heavily loaded SAP servers and enabling tighter integration among the city's SAP applications,” says Dimension Data.
COJ acting CIO Abraham Mahlangu adds that running the SAP billing application on the Dimension Data platform enables integration with the COJ's other SAP systems, helps gear the city for a single view of its residents and gets the COJ closer to the point at which citizens will have a single point of entry to its services.
Mangale says having bedded down the COJ into a stable business-as-usual environment, Dimension Data can now begin to offer recommendations on how the city can more fully exploit technology to drive further savings, efficiencies, and service delivery innovations.
He adds that Dimension Data is working with the COJ on a long-term strategic ICT plan.
Improving performance
By changing its outsourcer, the COJ may steady the performance of its ICT systems and improve its service delivery, says the company.
Mahlangu says: “The city's priority throughout the changeover has been to guarantee business continuity.
“Dimension Data had the human and technology capacity and experience to provide that, but we've also been interested to see that they viewed the daunting complexity and urgency of the task as an opportunity rather than a challenge - including providing job security for 120 employees of the previous incumbent by taking them over.”
The IT company says since taking on the outsourcing contract, it has created continuous business performance improvements for the city.
An example of this is the service desk call answer rate of 12 seconds, which exceeds the industry average of 36 seconds identified by Gartner in the helpdesk benchmark statistics report, according to Dimension Data. It also says the call drop rate of 0.2% is below the Gartner average of 4.5%.
“Overall performance on severity one service level agreements has gone from the previous 77% to 94%, and on severity two from 85% to 100%,” it adds.
Addressing problem areas
“Apart from ensuring business continuity, these levels of service also translate into a significant improvement in customer care,” Mahlangu says.
The COJ's system has been plagued by billing issues since its installation. At the beginning of this year, about 800 000 residents received their bills late, due to technical glitches.
The Hello Peter Web site, in April, showed several complaints from citizens, ranging from double billing issues and wrong billing to inadequate assistance, if any, from the COJ's call centre.
Also, houses could not be transferred into their new owners' names, because of a backlog with issuing rate certificates.
Dimension Data says the migration of the city's operations onto its platform has enabled consolidation and integration of services, eliminating duplication, increasing efficiencies and positioning the COJ to do more with less infrastructure and fewer technology components.
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