The Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) will next week unveil a range of mobile applications to access government services. These will be revealed at the Gauteng ICT Summit to take place on Thursday.
GPG spokesperson Sithembiso Ndlovu says the GPG mobile applications will support government-to-employee, government-to-citizen and government-to-business interaction.
According to Ndlovu, a survey was conducted by Wits Business School, in partnership with government, to gather public opinion on which services Gauteng residents had interest in accessing via mobile devices, as well as what devices are preferred.
Although Ndlovu did not reveal the finer details of the mobile app system at this stage, he says services that will be available to citizens through the mobile apps include applications for permits, traffic fines payment, problem reporting (for instance potholes), emergency reporting and electronic recruitment. The apps will also offer a school and hospital locator which is GPS-enabled, a transport schedule (eg, with a Gautrain link), and school results notification.
The government to employee services offered by the mobile apps include automated leave management for employees, government pensions benefit payment automation, procurement document approvals, 30-day payment monitoring dashboard and many other dashboards, says Ndlovu.
Businesses are also expected to benefit from the app services by being able to self-register as a supplier, submit invoices and obtain business opportunities reports through mobile devices.
Mobile advantage
"A number of studies have been conducted by [industry] experts, such as the International Data Corporation, which demonstrated that the use of mobile devices is going to be adopted globally," says Ndlovu. "Surveys have shown that many people in SA access the Internet via mobile devices. In contrast, only a few people have access to desktop computers. Therefore, as government, we found it appropriate that we should exploit this technology in bridging the digital divide."
He notes that the use of smart devices will alleviate some of the reasons that compel citizens to travel to town in order to execute a request for a government service. "For an example, previously job-seekers in Gauteng would converge at 78 Fox Street in order to submit application forms for jobs advertised by one government department or another. We initially moved this to the Internet and made it available by creating Internet kiosks in certain government buildings. By putting the e-Recruitment application on the mobile platform, job-seekers need not even go to a kiosk or Internet caf'e to apply for an advertised government post."
MEC for finance Mandla Nkomfe says the emergence of new information and communication technologies has not only revolutionised the way business is conducted, but also transformed the delivery mechanism of government services. "Service delivery is of paramount importance to us, and technology is giving us ways to offer services smarter and quicker to citizens. Mobile devices are taking the world by storm and we need to take advantage of this."
Ndlovu says the ICT Summit will also tackle issues of IT security, productivity, mobile application management, mobile platform management, and the challenges of BYOD during discussion sessions. "Security is one of the topics that will crop up in all the discussion sessions of the summit. There is a need for security on the infrastructure, on the applications and on the operating systems. A representative from the office of the auditor-general will participate in one of the discussion panels and will give an opinion on governance in the deployment of cloud services."
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