The Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) is revamping the Gauteng Provincial Government`s (GPG) IT infrastructure, says GSSC CIO Livingstone Chilwane.
The GSSC has been operational for a year and was established to perform core administrative functions, including technology support services (TSS), financial services, human resources (HR), procurement, and risk and compliance auditing for the 11 departments within the GPG.
Chilwane says TSS encompasses operations and infrastructure services, application management, information security, IT architecture and programme management.
"There are approximately 20 000 connected computers in the GPG and 120 000 staff in 250 buildings across 93 sites within the province that need to be serviced."
He says a multi-layered approach had to be adopted to upgrade the IT infrastructure within the province.
The first phase involves establishing the infrastructure to ensure all departments have access to the wide area network. This phase is still under way and should be completed by the end this financial year.
"The second phase is to roll-out generic technology to all departments, standardising, repairing and transforming all local areas networks," he says.
This was necessary because the responsibility had previously been delegated to each department within the province. Chilwane says this resulted in no common standards when it came to desktops, operating systems, security and so on, which made roll-out across departments very difficult.
"We have therefore had to restructure and implement common disciplines, so that we can begin to roll-out more PCs to more of the approximately 100 000 employees who do not have PCs," he says.
The third phase of the project involves managing department specific technology and the business applications that support it.
To facilitate the centralised control of service to all 11 departments within the province, Chilwane says the GSSC has employed 1 000 people, moving IT support staff from the various departments with a policy to employ no more than 20% of the staff from outside the GPG. A further 500 employees are still to be employed.
He says a data centre has also been constructed within the GSSC, with comprehensive backups of hosted provincial information, tight user security protocols, firewall protection and administration, and remote network monitoring tools to detect network infrastructure failures.
A call centre is also operational with around 45 seats of the 100 seats being utilised.
"Our document centre is processing around 110 000 documents a month which are then routed through our workflow system and the call centre handling about 8 000 calls a week," Chilwane says.
The GSSC has also implemented the first phase of its enterprise resource planning project, using SAP`s Procure to Pay automated platform for the R4.5 billion of services and goods procured annually by the GPG. Chilwane says the GSSC is also utilising SAP`s finance, HR components, e-learning, and training and call centre modules.
In terms of budget, Chilwane says the TSS commands a budget of R238 million and influences provincial budgets in excess of R500 million, with the budget set to increase by about 30% to 40%.
"As more hardware is rolled out to the province and infrastructure is upgraded, so the budget will need to increase. This will not only standardise and raise the quality of service within the province, but also ultimately make it cheaper.
"Once the GSSC has been fully established, the IT budgets of the 11 departments will be given back to them. It is expected that by 2005, all departments will pay for the service they receive from the GSSC."
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