Partnership assists government with compliance, BPM

At a launch event held at the glamorous Sheraton hotel in Pretoria, Bytes Systems Integration, Metastorm and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) announced a partner relationship that will help the South African government meet compliance regulations and bring the benefits and efficiencies of business process management (BPM) to the public sector.

The relationship is one of great synergy, and clients will benefit from a multidisciplinary team of professionals with a global footprint and extensive local knowledge.

PwC is the largest professional services firm in the world, and will assist in defining compliance requirements and assess gaps and opportunities, as well as define and engineer a standard set of processes, which will meet the compliance requirements.

Bytes SI will deploy the required technology to embed these requirements, in particular, Metastorm BPM, which is one of the best BPM suites available in the market today.

"Bytes Systems Integration and PwC are uniquely positioned in the market to assist the public sector with ensuring compliance to legislation. To this end, we have invested in building a BPM competence that is underpinned by Metastorm, a best of breed BPM Suite," says Justin Arnoldi, Divisional Manager of Bytes SI.

According to Jan Gey van Pittius, a partner at PwC, "The challenge all levels of public sector institutions are currently faced with is to improve service delivery, while complying with numerous acts and regulations. There seems to be a constant trade-off between improving service delivery and complying with key legislation.

"This increases the cost of compliance with no assurance that compliance is effectively achieved. By approaching compliance differently, service delivery can improve and at the same time all key regulations can be complied with, by strategically embedding in it into the operational processes, and making use of BPM technologies."

To date, the two largest BPM installations in the public sector have been concluded with Metastorm, namely the NCIS and a major federal agency, both in the USA. Metastorm commands 30% of the UK local government market and has the largest public sector customer base of all the BPM suite vendors internationally.

Neil Berry, Director of International Sales at Metastorm, comments: "Governments all over the world are facing similar challenges, such as aligning strategy with compliance regulations. Metastorm has experience with public sector internationally, and can bring this best practice knowledge to South Africa to help government use technology most effectively to improve processes, and thereby insure greater compliance.

Concludes Arnoldi: "In a relatively short space of time, Metastorm has achieved excellent results in the South African public sector, with over 10 reference sites. We believe we have the international credibility and process experience, as well local context to address the South Africa public sector-embedded compliance requirement."