E-government in SA: how far to go?

ICT in the public sector has the potential to revolutionise delivery. The clear example is the South African Revenue Service's electronic tax filing system (see sidebar), which has cut costs, improved efficiency and brought in more revenue for the government.

Other departments range from good to totally dysfunctional. What's needed to get them to the SARS's level? More training? More experience? More co-operation with the private sector? ITWeb invited a panel of experts to give their views.

Present were Andrew Holden, MD of outsource services at Bytes Technology Group; Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems; Dr Pete Janse van Vuuren, executive partner at Gartner SA; Desan Naidoo, GM of public sector at SAS Institute SA; Justin Thorpe, business development manager at MTN Network Solutions; Inana Nkanza, MD at Sun Microsystems SA; Lee Naik, head of public sector consulting at Accenture; Amir Lubashevsky, director of Magix Integration; Alf Kale, executive director of public services at SAP Africa; Hamilton Ratshefola, CEO of Cornastone Consulting Group; Reshaad Ahmed, senior manager of Internet business solutions group at Cisco SA; Linos Siwedi, government account manager at Printacom Technologies; and Patrick Makhubedu, sales director at TSSMS.

Linos Siwedi, Printacom: We need to communicate with the [educational] institutions so they can align students with what we need. We donate printers to various schools in the townships so we have contact with them. If you ask a student what he's doing, he'll tell you 'general science', which really doesn't guarantee that when he [completes] matric he'll be able to follow a technical career. If we could perhaps grab these guys from matric, we could get them into SETAs and get them up to speed. Government could also give companies contracts to train five or six people within a department, so when a project comes to an end, they will be able to run their own projects.

Lee Naik, Accenture: Lots of tenders coming from government stipulate skills transfer as a requirement. But we train people, we lead them in projects and what happens within months is that those people leave [government] to return to the private sector. We're working with provinces at the moment on a holistic strategy for ICT. For the first time I've seen the Office of the Premier come to us and ask what they should be doing - not in a haphazard manner as we vendors often do by selling a piece here and a piece there - but what they're getting wrong as a whole. We've consulted with over 200 stakeholders across the industry and it's clear that the skills shortage is not a government problem alone.

Inana Nkanza, Sun Microsystems: One of the things we realised in our interactions with government is that we need to take things a step further. We talk about bursaries for university students. We talk about trying to get to high schools - but we have a belief that we've discussed with the ministers of Health and of Education that we actually don't have a technology focus in terms of our youth development - our children. When you get into a private primary school, a lot of these kids have a computer and get to touch technology at a very early age. How do we get children to be technology-savvy right the way through school? Then it will be easy for government to recruit. At the moment we're just creating a small pool of resources that we then fight over.

Dr Pete Janse van Vuuren, Gartner SA: One of the biggest movements within government departments is implementation and then, obviously, development, so they're on the same standard as the rest of industry. There's a huge drive, on the one hand, for CIOs to develop themselves and, on the other, government is saying the talking is over and now it's time to do things.

Reshaad Ahmed, Cisco SA: Government CIOs are having to build their business cases and not just for citizen-centric projects. They can't just decide on specific projects from a citizen's point of view; it has to be from an economic perspective as well. Those standards apply to internal projects as well.

Janse van Vuuren: I agree. They have to run their businesses like businesses. The procurement arena, for example, is being re-looked. Things like e-procurement are becoming a big driver. Government is saying it needs to make it easier for outside suppliers to do business with it because without them, it can't do very much. Indigenous skills development is another issue. About a month ago, minister Geraldine Fraser-Moloketi got a bunch of players in a room and said: "I've heard what everybody's had to say. Now I want to hear what everybody's going to do."

Patrick Makhubedu, TSSMS: Some of the CIOs need to get their alignment right with the politicians. If your political head is a minister or a deputy, sometimes even to the level of a director-general, and you don't have the right mindset of how IT impacts your business, you will always struggle. That's why there are so many changes at the CIO level in government - 18 months is a long time for them. Most CIOs are coming to realise the value of the SARS model, though. The more we educate the political heads, the better, and the more CIOs are elevated to DG or political level, the better.

Hamilton Ratshefola, Cornastone: It's a very simple issue. We have a real problem as long as the government becomes a stepping stone, and a potential CIO treats government as a very cushy job so he can further his studies. So you cannot win if you have no retention strategy. You can see why SARS and the National Treasury are the best-run departments within government. Pravin [Ghordan, commissioner of SARS] has been there for 10 years. He doesn't chop and change. He arrived in 1997 and has been running the department since then. There's consistency. His boss at National Treasury has the same attitude towards leadership and attracting the right people. The problem with every government department except those two is that their strategy is not consistent. If you go to what I call an A-class department, there's strategy, there's leadership and it's consistent. The C-classes chop and change every 18 months. If the DG gets fired, the whole structure becomes loose. It's lack of leadership at the highest level. Trevor [Manuel] and Pravin are there and they execute. Unfortunately, they have an unfair advantage - they hold the purse strings.

Alf Kale, SAP: The role of the CIO has changed. He's now an advisor at the board level where the DG is one of the board members and the minister would be the chairman. I agree that it's a lack of leadership. As a leader, you need to put plans in place. The reason people run around too much is a lack of personal development. You can see the CIOs that came from industry: Barry Hoare, Michelle Williams, Ken Jarvis - there's a difference in culture.

Ahmed: There are things to learn from business and the enterprise. In business and large enterprises, the CIO is a senior person who is elevated almost to board level at times. The direction of technology strategy and strategic optimisation is determined by him, and he needs to be able to think like that. But how do you make sure a government CIO can see where he goes next?

Amir Lubashevsky, Magix Integration: When we try to develop ICT in government, the decision is often political. We can present solutions and technologies, but the CIO needs to survive a political process, perhaps just before an election. The fact that Ken Jarvis did so well in SARS is because he treated his job as a business.

Naik: It's all about the person you're hiring to be CIO. He should be able to talk business, know what the board wants and what the strategic objectives are. All the guys that work for SARS at that management level embrace the way Pravin's taking that organisation. I hear what Hamilton [Ratshefola] says about A-class and B-class, but there are too many D- and E-class people as well. How did they even get a CIO position?

Siwedi: The critical issue is that if you deal with government, you have to know certain people within procurement - and it doesn't stop there. There's finance and other people that sign off. So you have to follow up and chase your invoice to the last. The systems are not there. If you don't do that as a company, then you run the risk of not getting paid in time. If you don't chase or follow up, then you risk not being paid at all.

If government needs to see how they're doing with delivery, they can check with me.

Alf Kale, executive director of public services, SAP

Desan Naidoo, SAS Institute: I think that, as suppliers and vendors, we can allocate those resources to chase payment, but smaller companies and partners cannot. That's a real problem. I disagree that systems aren't in place - I think they are. The problem is accountability. Too often things sit on people's desks and they're not accountable for what they need to do.

Janse van Vuuren: There are some departments that pay well as per agreement and there are some that are terrible - really terrible. I think a very hard line should be taken with them. If they take the responsibility to buy something, they should be accountable. It's our money, after all. The other thing that government can do is put in a properly managed e-procurement system. Then the rules will be done electronically rather than for personal or political reasons.

Lubashevsky: Account management for the public sector is very different than for the private sector. You have to know each and every one of the functions. The guy who signed the tender is not the guy who signed the order, and the guy who signed the order is not the guy who's going to sign the cheque. That's why you have to walk the corridors, you have to know the people and you have to know - I'm not exaggerating - about 50 people. We talk about skills shortages, but there seems to be no shortage of people who push paper in the procurement process.

Ratshefola: Everything is about maturity. There are organisations with mature processes, including procurement. The challenge we have is that there's a tendency right now at the pre-procurement stage for people to ask: "What's in it for me to get this done?" We never used to have that. I believe this is where this country's going in the wrong direction. There are a lot of people who are being paid good money to do their jobs and they aren't doing it; they want to be bribed to do their jobs. So that's what's wrong with procurement today. I do business with banks and telcos, and if I can provide a solution to their problem, then we do business. That's it. There are no questions about what's in it for them.

There's a huge drive for CIOs to develop themselves.

Dr Pete Janse van Vuuren, executive partner, Gartner SA

Kale: We cannot allow ourselves to work like that. As well as being business people, we're also citizens and we demand the best from this government. It's facing a number of challenges right now - one of them is doing more with less and we, as industry, need to help them there - but a key one is that they need to start running government as a business. As a citizen, I can help them. I'm a taxpayer, so if they need money, they must talk to me. I'm a vendor who lives for IT in the public sector, so if they need solutions, they must talk to me. And because I'm a citizen, if they need to see how they're doing with delivery, they can check with me.

Makhubedu: I think most procurement processes are there; it's just the people who need to be changed. The procurement guy wants to discuss infrastructure deployment with me, but he's got no clue what a switch or a network looks like. And in some departments, the poor IT guys even get left out of the discussion.

Naik: I'll give you an example: the National Treasury has a new standard for the charter of accounts. Now IFMS will deal with that when it comes into play. But right now, on the ground, the actual practitioners have no idea how it's been done. The process is fine, the technologies are fine, but the practitioners have it all wrong. Any new solution can't forget about people.

There are a lot of people who are being paid good money to do their jobs and they aren't doing it.

Hamilton Ratshefola, CEO, Cornastone Consulting

Nkanza: I believe we have challenges with legacy. Technology today is enabling us to do things we couldn't do before. One of the biggest challenges with government departments is integration. The reason we have problems is we're trying to make new-age systems work off old technology. That's a major problem and we have a long way to go. Checking on your birth information today should work by going from GSM via your phone to an IP-based network so you can see what's happening at Home Affairs and link it to the Department of Health. But we can't do that, because the data retrieval is holding us back. It's not the technology. That could be developed by all of us here around the table.

Is SARS an unfair benchmark against which government departments should be compared? As pointed out, it does hold the purse strings. But the other lessons from its success are things any government department can learn: departments should be run like businesses, leadership needs to be clear and consistent, and processes transparent. And if they need feedback, they can check with the citizens first.