Other provinces are tracking happenings at the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) and discussions are under way around duplicating the way it delivers services to the Gauteng Provincial Government in other public sector organisations in SA.
This emerged at a joint GSSC/ITWeb seminar on transforming public sector delivery through IT in Johannesburg yesterday.
GSSC CEO Mike Roussos said the GSSC has been seen by some as a pilot project around how best to improve the delivery of services to government departments. After just a year in operation, the GSSC had already had a positive impact on services delivery, said Roussos.
The GSSC is charged with providing human resources, procurement, financial, internal audit and technology support services to the 11 departments within the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG).
Yesterday`s event provided a forum for public and private sector IT professionals to review the progress made by the GSSC in fulfilling its mandate and discuss the challenges it still faced.
Although he could not yet claim that the organisation was completely fulfilling its mandate, "we have taken some important steps", said Roussos. It recently bedded down a new SAP system and this, together with a document management centre (DMC) and call centre, was making a considerable contribution to improving service delivery.
The DMC currently processes over 1 240 000 documents per annum in an environment traditionally hampered by extended paper trails. It expects to handle up to 1.6 million soon. The contact centre handles 1 200 calls per day and expects to increase this to 1 800 per day in the near future, said Roussos.
Livingstone Chilwane, GSSC CIO and GM of its Technology Support Services (TSS) business unit, said the TSS aimed to enable the transformation of the GPG into a smart province through the use of information and communications technologies.
He said this would be achieved through providing integrated service delivery supported by one-stop shops for the GSSC`s customers and suppliers, and ease of access to government services through alternate delivery channels such as the Internet and call centres.
Chilwane said the TSS already empowers GPG employees to be more efficient through ease of access to information pertinent to service delivery, and by ensuring an improvement in the GPG`s ability to interact more effectively with its business partners and suppliers.
Chilwane said the TSS recognised it "can`t do everything at the same time" due to the myriads of IT requirements across the province and the different types of technology currently in use. But a balance had been found between addressing day-to-day operations and streamlining business activities while aligning new initiatives with the province`s overall strategy.
Currently suffering from a shortage of IT skills, he said the TSS`s future recruitment drives would focus on appointing "good managers" to drive planning and strategy, and that the GSSC would partner with the private sector to execute defined IT initiatives.
Other speakers at the seminar included EDS Middle East and Africa chairman Michael Minassian, Dimension Data application solutions sales manager Mary-Lynne Golembo, iLAB enterprise open source director Stephen Owens and South African Post Office new ventures head Marietjie Lancaster.
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