News & Views
Moving from silos to virtual government
 Speaking
on the subject of connected government, SITA GM of Converged
Communications Infrastructure Services Navin Singh said that the
challenge facing South Africa was to find a way to extend
government as an enterprise to all its constituents.
“An information society begins with a connected government,”
said Singh, “and connected government is a culmination of a
variety of themes coming together. We need to gravitate from a
vertical, silo-based government onto a horizontal - and
eventually a virtual - platform.”
One of the key building blocks is the positioning of the public
sector as an integrated enterprise. “Governments are
increasingly being expected to provide the same services as the
private sector, and are being benchmarked against the private
sector,” he said.
So how far is South Africa towards having a connected
government?
In terms of a United Nations survey on the subject, Singh says
we are better placed than most other parts of Africa, but are
still behind the rest of the developed world. But how should we
move forward, is the big question?
“We need to take a different approach from the typical
architecture used in government,” he said. “Most of the
countries that are ahead in this respect invested in
connectivity and broadband infrastructure well in advance. The
main founding pillars of eGovernment are infrastructure,
policies and capacity development and SITA is the catalyst.
Through network horizontalisation we can take ICT from being a
back office tool to a key aspect of the connected government.”
The Australian government ranked as one of the top ten globally.
He said that this was achieved through executive sponsorship,
understanding the needs holistically and identifying key issues.
This would include issues such as one number to call, single
sign-on, unified health records, connected schools and other
institutions and a value chain approach.
“The problems they experienced were consistent with various
countries, and are not very different from the challenges facing
us in South Africa,” said Singh. “The network serves as an
impetus to form a layer across agencies, and there is no ‘one
size fits all’ approach from a network services standpoint.
Singh cited Gartner statistics on social network analysis and
said they do not make specific reference to the network as it is
intrinsic to all services. He said that if we draw on the OSI
model which is standard in the ICT world, then the network is
fundamental, and network infrastructure is the key building
block for connected government.
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