SA’s public sector has pockets of excellence in terms of advanced digital service delivery, but more progress must be made towards cohesive digital transformation across government, in order to drive the change that citizens need.
This is according to Sandile Dube, country manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SA, speaking ahead of a HPE Webinar on Robust IT Infrastructure for Government this week.
Dube says: “Progress has been made in pockets, but the challenge is how do we then assist the government in replicating the successes they’ve had in some areas, to all those areas where it’s really required?”
Dube believes making progress is as simple as ‘just starting’.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the magnitude of a project to digitally transform all government departments and services. But we need to start – at a small scale if we have to. Start in a province, or if that’s too big, start in a city in the province, treat it as a proof of concept and build on it. Now is not the time to get stuck in analysis paralysis for too long,” he says.
He points to successes such as offering Home Affairs services at banks, but notes that without a cohesive value chain for identity across all government departments and services, other ‘low hanging fruit’ is missed. “Departments aren’t intertwined with shared citizen identity information. That’s why people can get away with crimes multiple times, for example.”
Another low hanging fruit that would be relatively easy to implement is the safe digital payment of social grants, he says. “The need for making social grants available to the unemployed in a safe, transparent way was highlighted during lockdown,” he says.
Dube says the government cannot implement its much-needed digital transformation alone: “Industry has a key role to play in collaborating with and delivering services to the government so it in turn can deliver better services to the people.”
He believes private sector collaboration can bring transformational solutions to government. “HPE has fantastic products, solutions and services that the government and citizens need; but we don’t have all the answers to all the problems the government faces. So, we need to think differently about cooperation and coopetition; we need to collaborate across the sector to bring together all the unique services into solutions for the betterment of citizens’ lives. We can collaborate across industries, and even across borders; there are no boundaries; and this is where HPE hit the nail on the head by offering our GreenLake service.”
During the Webinar, experts will outline how the success of a modern government is dependent on its underlying IT structure. Among the topics to be discussed are: Modern Workspace VDI as-a-Service, dHCI 2.0 with existing Servers & Nimble Storage, Practical Hybrid Cloud Architectures, and Managing IaaS with GreenLake Central.
For more information and to register for this event go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/hpe-robust-it-infrastructure-for-government/
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