SITA CEO Mavuso Msimang says the state IT Agency's position could require some "critical re-examination".
Msimang was delivering the keynote address at the ICT in Government conference organised by ForgeAhead and underway at the Vaal this week.
He said there had been questions of SITA's relevance, but noted the agency had significant achievements to its credit. Among them were that SITA hosts the payroll systems for most of the government employees, it hosts and runs some of the most sophisticated logistics systems in the world, and hosts examination systems for matric exams.
Msimang said in the past year SITA, together with the National Treasury, reduced the cost of hosting the financial applications of government by some R8 million, it also reduced the costs of the Internet and Web hosting operations by government by over R15 million, and together with Home Affairs, the agency connected most of the maternity hospitals to the Home Affairs system to allow them to print birth certificates for each child immediately.
[VIDEO]"We also played a pivotal role in uncovering the social grants scam that has seen millions of rands siphoned out," he said.
However, he conceded there had been questions over poor performance, high staff turnover and relevance of the agency.
"At the moment, no informed debate has taken place on the relevance of SITA. But a key paradigm shift to consider for successful e-government may be for SITA to move away from centralised control to centralised coordination."
He said SITA should serve to stimulate ICT industry growth and possibly play a facilitation role in the provision of ICT services to government.
"Government ICT agencies around the world fall evenly on a continuum that ranges from a pure agency to that of service provider. SITA presently leans more to a service provider role. While I don't believe we should be exclusively agency-oriented, the position we currently occupy does require some critical re-examination," he said.
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