The South African government already has in place the basics needed for it to easily migrate local government entities to “cloud” computing - and thereby save South African taxpayers billions of rands and, simultaneously, improve service delivery by an order of magnitude.
So says Cordys Software South Africa CEO, Mike Rolfe. “The point about cloud computing is that a single technology platform can easily and cost-effectively deliver multiple instances of particular types of software services, each of which is tailored very precisely to the specific needs of individual organisations.
“From a local government point of view, that means that each municipality can benefit from the economies of scale of using a single municipal services platform that provides exactly the same type of functionality to each municipality while still allowing the individual circumstances of particular municipalities to be taken into account.
“All the municipalities need to access the platform is Internet connectivity.”
The benefits of using the cloud in this way are many and significant. For one thing, it obviates the need for each municipality, many of which have tiny resident bases and are therefore desperately cash-strapped, to buy at considerable cost their own hardware and the software needed to run HR, billing, procurement, asset management, and all the other activities relevant to municipalities.
“The six large metros can better afford to have their own bespoke systems,” Rolfe says. “But it makes no financial sense for the smaller towns or rural local government entities to be spending taxpayers' money on something that could so easily be provided far more cost-effectively on a fee per use basis.
“It also makes no sense for each local government to be tackling its operations in a highly individualistic way.
“The essence of efficiency and effectiveness is not having to reinvent the wheel - and having consistency of service types and service levels right across the country. Why have, for instance, lights and water dealt with in 390 different ways just because that's how many local government entities there are? Why not have one way of delivering the service and one way of billing for it and collecting the funds?
“All it takes to achieve that is one system working for all the municipalities in the same way all the time.”
Rolfe believes that such a system can be got up and running within a matter of months - because government already has most of the necessary facilities in place.
“The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) has both the dataset and the ability to house applications such as those that would be specific to running a municipality. It has 11 years' experience of consolidating and co-ordinating the state's IT resources in order to achieve cost savings through scale, increase delivery capabilities, and enhance operability.
“In addition, Govnet, South Africa's government online portal, is a virtual private network (VPN). In essence, VPNs are private clouds. All govnet has to do is extend its network capabilities to service local governments. Govnet already has all the authorisation and other security protocols in place that would make it possible for municipalities to assure their residents that using their cloud services would be a safe, secure way to transact with them.
“Between SITA and Govnet, therefore, the basics of a single local government platform already exist.”
What's missing, however, are the applications that would be needed to run local governments. Some third-party applications that have been designed specifically for the use of local governments do exist. Almost all of them are proprietary and, as a consequence, not suitable for use in the cloud.
“An open source - or services-oriented architecture (SOA) - platform is needed, because that would enable business processes to be designed and deployed very quickly,” Rolfe says. “In fact, with a system like the Cordys Business Process Factory, which makes available reusable process components in a graphic format that can simply be dragged and dropped into any application, municipalities (or SITA), could create relevant business processes for individual municipalities more or less on the fly.
“Because the processes are rules-based, the municipal applications could be made to comply with government regulations, eliminating human error in both the creation of and the use of the processes.
“And, because the system is open, third-party applications can be easily added - if doing so saves the expense and time of developing such applications in-government.”
Provisioning both the entire platform and the system requirements of each municipality would be automated, again according to pre-established rules based on best practice adapted for regional circumstances.
“Industry analysts are predicting that as much as 87% of all computing will be inside the cloud by 2013. If local government doesn't embrace the cloud, it risks being even more anachronistic than it already is,” Rolfe says.
“And, given that government already has the backbone for a private cloud in place, there isn't any really good reason that can be explained to ratepayers why municipalities should not be equipped to embrace the cloud long before 2013.”
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