A complete overhaul of its procurement arm, a rationalisation of services on offer and reassessing how it deploys its staff are all part of the State IT Agency's (SITA) new CEO's "turnaround strategy".
Speaking at a breakfast briefing co-hosted by ITWeb in Johannesburg this morning, CEO Mavuso Msimang said it was "clear from everything that ICT and SITA occupy a very strategic position. The observation has been that we have tended to spread ourselves too thinly. A turnaround will require us to focus."
SITA's procurement arm, known as the IT Acquisition Centre (ITAC), "has come under very serious attack from all sides," he said, with criticism being directed at its services, pricing and the length of its procurement processes. Overall, he said, a recent customer satisfaction survey had revealed SITA's services delivery here and in other areas was "not up to requirement".
ITAC, he said, required "urgent attention...we have lost a tremendous amount of money here". Every area of SITA's business should, ideally, "at least recover costs".
SITA was discussing how best to streamline ITAC's processes and procedures with the National Treasury and consultants. A new model was in the process of being developed, which would be work-shopped with government departments. Msimang said he hoped the new model would be ready for implementation in July/August. "By then we should be able to talk about a 'new look' ITAC."
Ideally, the organisation needed to provide business advisory services, business solutions delivery services, systems portfolio management and centres of excellence in order to fulfil its mandate of cost-effectively enhancing public service delivery through ICT, he said.
"We are focusing on this more than anything else. If we have this pot of skills, we believe we will be in a position to fulfil our mandate."
Financially, he said, SITA had "not done badly", with revenues for 2004 in the region of R2.3 billion. "It would be criminal not to make a profit," he said. But there was considerable scope for improvement, as many SITA employees were engaged in providing non-revenue-generating services not included in its mandate.
"I think there is a lot of room for curbing costs through the institution," he said. In addition, a recent internal survey saw SITA employees rating the effectiveness of top management at a low 34%. "Even the people we employ and lead are not terribly comfortable with the leadership we provide," said Msimang.
As far as individual performance, productivity and revenue generation per employee was concerned, Msimang said this varied greatly from province to province. For example, the average number of technical devices supported by Northern Cape employees was 197, while those in the Limpopo region were responsible, on average, for only 26 per staff member.
In addition, employees based at SITA's head offices added far more value to the organisation's bottom line than those operating in the regions. There was also a significant disparity between monies paid to contractors and salaries earned by permanent employees, he said. SITA had, said Msimang, "good cause to relook how it deploys its staff".
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