The recent annual government ICT conference, GovTech, hosted by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) was interesting and informative indeed. On the one hand I was left encouraged by government's willingness to embrace ICT and to use technology as a platform to improve service delivery to the citizens of South Africa. While on the other hand, I was left rather disappointed with how far government still has to go to fully leverage techology to improve service delivery to citizens.
Embracing Technology
The conference saw many topics being discussed, ranging from cloud computing to social networking as a way for government to connect with the citizens. There seems to be a much stronger position from the office of Minister Baloyi that SITA must play its rightful role of being government's primary systems integrator. Since its establishment, SITA has found it difficult to get state entities to utilise it in a manner that was envisaged in the law that was put in place to create SITA. However, SITA itself seems to recognize the role of partnerships with the ICT private sector to fast track government's adoption of ICT in service delivery.
Challenges
Government departments continue to have separate IT systems which operate separate from each other, which means that the integration of systems and therefore the information which resided on those systems remains a pipe-dream. In a nutshell, the SA government seems to be struggling to deploy and leverage technology for itself and its own employees, let alone using technology to engage with citizens. In my view, a critical factors towards the success of government using technology to improve its service delivery, is the deployment of a centralized database which allows for a single view of each citizen across all areas of government.
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