The State IT Agency (SITA) will, in the coming months, be assessed as a prime systems integrator (PSI) and, if it passes, will be among the first companies in SA to get certified.
SITA CEO Blake Mosley-Lefatola told ITWeb that passing the assessment will mean the agency receives Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) certification.
CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organisations with essential elements for improving performance. The improvement includes identifying an organisation's process strengths and weaknesses, and making process changes to turn weaknesses into strengths, according to the Software Engineering Institute.
“We will be among very few organisations that have actually gotten the CMMI assessment certificates within SA, if we do have any. I'm not sure if there are any,” said the CEO.
Modernising government
The agency's priorities for this financial year include improving its capability as a PSI.
It's important that SITA demonstrates its capability to work as a PSI, because one of the major challenges that it has is in the modernisation of the public sector, said Mosley-Lefatola.
“We are not leveraging IT as much and as optimally [as we could be] to improve effective and efficient service delivery. That's the task we've got.”
Client impatience
“As a corollary to that would be the rolling out of the IFMS [Integrated Finance Management System].”
The CEO said there are huge pressures for SITA to upscale its rollout of the IFMS, which is a strategic project that was approved by Cabinet in 2005 to replace current legacy transversal applications in use in government.
Upon completion, it will consolidate and renew government's back-office applications.
Public service and administration minister Richard Baloyi said at the annual GovTech conference yesterday that an announcement will be made regarding the rollout of the IFMS very soon.
However, Mosley-Lefatola said the necessary announcements on the rollout will be made at an appropriate time, since there are still outstanding modules that need to be completed by the end of this financial year and it still has to go through a consultation process.
He also said SITA is at about the halfway mark of carrying out its turnaround strategy, which was designed as a three-year programme.
“While clients are appreciating what we are doing to improve our services, they are also impatient to feel the effects of the turnaround strategy.”
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