Johannesburg, 28 Aug 2015
The Western Cape government was honoured at the recent OpenText Innovation Tour 2015, with Egsaan Samaai, acting Chief Director: Transversal Applications Development at the Western Cape government: Department of the Premier, taking top honours for the local OpenText "Big Think" award for 2015.
"The Western Cape government is honoured to receive acknowledgement in pursuit of improved service delivery," says Samaai.
According to Helen'e Swart, Business Unit Manager: Enterprise Information Management (EIM) for the Western Cape at Datacentrix, the government department's EIM partner, Samaai has been instrumental in supporting the evolution of enterprise content management (ECM) from isolated pockets within the provincial government through to the roll-out of content management across all departments.
"Mr Samaai oversaw the initial implementation of a provincial e-filing blueprint that has formalised the positioning of content management as a discipline within the province, and helped to establish a more responsive public sector in keeping with provincial strategic objectives. He has been influential in transitioning ECM from an IT-owned service to a business-owned service that is supported by IT."
Recognising the need for effective and sustainable roll-out and support of the ECM environment, Samaai centralised the previously separately located department installations and established a new enterprise instance to cater to the ramping up of adoption by departments, while ensuring existing installations are continually managed.
Says Swart: "Mr Samaai vigorously pushed for right-sized and appropriated architecture platforms in support of the burgeoning ECM adoption, with the current migration onto a new on-premises private cloud platform.
"In addition to this, he has also been a driving force in piloting the use of advanced electronic signatures within the province. His involvement is key in enabling the move towards a paperless, online environment within the department. This will support higher velocity collaboration on, and routing of, recommendation and approval of key records, reducing the requirement to print, sign and circulate hard copies of natively digital content."
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