SITA can't stand alone

The State IT Agency (SITA) does not have the capacity to deliver on its mandate, according to CEO Blake Mosley-Lefatola.

He yesterday said the agency needs to mobilise the expertise that is in society in general to deliver on its mandate since it cannot do this on its own. "This is why we've adopted a partnership model."

The theme of this year's GovTech event, which will end today, is 'ICT Collaboration - Across and Beyond Government'. In light of this, SITA and government in general have been pushing for partnerships with industry.

The CEO gave the example of the controversial integrated financial management system (IFMS), the tender for which was granted in June this year to consulting firm Accenture.

He explained that the system will be running across atleast 130 departments and serving approximately 1.2 million end users. "We don't have the capacity to do it on our own. We need partners from the private sector to help meet the objectives."

The system will be rolled out across national and provincial government and intends to replace the numerous disparate, inadequate and/or outdated systems currently employed by the public sector.

In its final state, the system is expected to fulfil government's supply chain management, financial management, HR management and business intelligence requirements.

Executive of Supply Chain Management at SITA Thenji Mjoli said the partnership model won't make SITA bloated or inefficient.

"Our partnership model is not about adding layers and layers. It's really about augmenting capabilities."

She added that the agency created a capability model and within it there is a focus on in-house capabilities. Partnerships must talk to the internal capabilities. "It would be inefficient of us to create all that capacity if it is not optimally used."

SITA board member Nontobeko Ntsinde added that the partnerships at SITA level aim to remove the situation where separate government departments set up their own partnerships at different levels.

She explains that this approach has been costing government a lot of money because all the capacity has been sitting in pockets. The agency is now trying to streamline this through partnerships at its level.

SITA board member Maredi Mphahlele also said the partnership model plays a dual role. It sees the distribution ofpartners to different provinces and at different levels and so it is not just big companies that are engaged with. This then helps smaller companies and SMMEs.

Ntsinde said there needs to be collaboration across and beyond government. It is currently government delivering to citizens and SITA delivering to government and that needs to be extended.

"Our message to the private sector is that we've got the responsibility to ensure that IT contributes to the national agenda and national priorities that government set and in that sense we have finalised and are in the process of implementing our partnership programme and strategy with the private sector," said the CEO.

He added that there are three objectives in this regard.

The first is that SITA needs to mobilise the private sector to address the development of local IT and secondly, to contribute towards the growth of the local ICT sector in the country to create jobs.

The third objective is to sensitise the private sector to the importance of contributing to the growth of ICT SMMEs.

The CEO also said since last year's GovTech where questions were asked about a focus on SMMEs.

He said there has been fairly significant progress and there is a strategy for SMMEs that has been developed.

SITA is in its third and final year of the turnaround strategy and "significant institutional progress has been made", according to Mosley-Lefatola.

"We're not turning around for the sake of turning around." He added that SITA wants effective, efficient service delivery and want to be a customer-centric entity.