DPSA renews e-govt push

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 27 May 2008

Despite e-government failing in its implementation so far, government is embarking on a renewed, aggressive drive to fully automate 100 public services.

This is according to public services and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who yesterday announced her department would kick-start this drive with a bid to automate six essential government services that affect the poor directly.

According to a request for bids, discussed during a compulsory briefing for interested parties yesterday, ID book applications, birth registrations, foster child grant applications, old-age pension applications, maintenance order applications, and death notices are all to be moved into the digital era.

Fraser-Moleketi says her department will not step on other departments' toes in the process.

"We are not taking on other mandates; we are looking at how we can work collaboratively - this is a platform for them [other departments] as well."

She notes the e-government agenda is now an imperative and not a nice-to-have. "We can't delay this any further."

According to the minister, the three-month period for the project design, analysis, roll-out and implementation is, therefore, attainable.

The bid for the supply and implementation of the next-generation e-government platform has been broken down into seven technical areas:

* Portal: has to be a self-service and information platform, has to allow for interaction, content, feedback, push technologies, various languages, blogs and personalisation.
* Intelligent forms: Web-based forms have to be designed for all six services identified under the tender, with a common interface and a secure validation process.
* Identity and access management: graded, role-based authentication for citizens and employees with reduced sign-ons, as well as the use of biometrics and smart cards.
* Process automation: re-engineering processes for e-government workflow, and the alignment of this into the design tools; the creation of common user interfaces.
* Data warehousing and business intelligence (BI): provision of an end-to-end, scalable solution covering management, organisation and exploitation; allowing for data-mining and BI.
* Documents and records management: a turnkey solution that has to bring all the documentation together and provide for different lifecycles; needs documented interfaces.
* Data extract, transformation and loading: working from multiple databases to extract secure data for verification purposes.

Companies, individuals and consortiums can bid for any one of these technical areas, or all of them.

Five work streams have been identified in order to make the project more manageable.

These streams are architecture, process and analysis (including documents and process workflow automation), data integration and federation, service delivery (including training, ICT enablement and creating a service delivery culture), the e-government portal infrastructure, and identity management infrastructure.

Companies can also bid for any one, or all, of these streams as part of their tenders, but even if more than one stream is awarded to the same company, all the work still has to be delivered within 30 days.

Companies have until 20 June to tender. The Department of Public Services and Administration (DPSA) could not attach a timeline to when the tender would be adjudicated.

Bigger picture

Government CIO Michelle Williams says these six initiatives should be considered to be "catalytic projects" for the DPSA's drive to automate 100 services by the year 2014.

This is because, she says, government is not currently reaping the benefits of all the money it is spending on ICT.

"We have seen limited progress in the last five years [in the uptake of e-government]," she says. "This is why a fundamental change is needed. We should no longer see disjointed government services - they should all be seamless."

She explains that the platform set in place through the six catalytic projects should serve as a transversal infrastructure for government services to be delivered through any channel and department. This would cut down on the time spent interacting with all the different state entities.

"It should not be up to citizens and business to find and assemble different service offerings into a complete service experience."

She maintains that the work being done by the DPSA will not lead to duplication with other, department-specific, projects.

"All the relevant departments have been consulted and we have a governance model that involves the different processes and service drivers."

She maintains: "There is no going back - e-government is imperative; we need to get moving.

"The e-government process is back on track and I am comfortable with it going forward."