In the next financial year, the State IT Agency (SITA) will automate the whole procurement process, starting with issuing tenders online, evaluation, adjudication and awarding of tenders, as well as contracts management.
This is according to Jabulile Tlhako, acting chief procurement officer at SITA, speaking on the topic of digital integration in the agency's procurement transactions on day two of GovTech 2016.
The move towards revised and modern procurement systems comes after years of criticism of SITA's legacy matters and its handling of government IT.
Tlhako said the state IT procurement arm was formed to consolidate the ICT spend, advisory and to make sure all government departments have one point of contact in terms of ICT.
Historically, SITA's processes are very administrative and manually-driven, she said. "We are chasing paper daily and that is not what procurement should be doing."
Tlhako added: "We need to leverage technology to benefit the government. We need to improve compliance to drive savings and make sure we are very efficient. Our turnaround times are too long because we are manual.
"The g-commerce portal is the e-catalogue for government departments so that they don't have to come to SITA every time they want to buy ICT goods and services; they can interact with the system."
Tlhako also noted that many of government's processes and projects have been fragmented for the longest time. "We estimate that South African government departments spend around R28 billion on ICT.
"We need to standardise because different departments are doing different things to get to the same output and if we standardise, we are going to save money for the country."
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