How much does government spend on ICT? Is it enough? And is it well spent? We hear much about lack of coordination, shortages of key skills and an unhappy workforce in SITA, along with challenges in implementing policy aimed at promoting e-services and narrowing the digital divide.
A new report, SA ICT spend in National and Provincial Government 2016 from analyst firm BMI-TechKnowledge, provides some answers.
Government spent R14bn on ICT in the 2015/2016 financial year, with limited growth expected through to 2018/2019, according to a new report.
South Africa’s government spent R14bn on information and communications technology (ICT) in the 2015/2016 financial year, with limited growth expected through to 2018/2019, when spending is projected to reach R15,3bn, a new research report has found.
Information and communications technology (ICT) have hailed in the fourth industrial revolution setting a new benchmark for business. However, this era of the Internet of Things (IoT) is also challenging and “disrupting” conventional government service delivery models.
As Dr. Setumo Mohapi, chief executive officer of the South African Information Technology Agency (SITA), points out, the facilitation of increased contribution to government activities by citizenry providing multi-modal public-service delivery.
Read more: ZA: GovTech 2016 lays foundations for Development, Access and Growth
I just read that Cape Town has been named Africa’s smartest city by a new report sponsored by Nokia. This comes as no surprise as Cape Town, the second largest city in South Africa has been in the news for its innovations in making use of technology to improve the lives of its inhabitants.
Early this year, in June, the city of Cape Town introduced free wifi in the MyCiti public bus, and only last month, they announced plans to roll out a fleet of electric buses in 2017. Some other principal smart city activities include CCTV, with 560 cameras located throughout the city, open data portal launched in 2015, and several pilots of a smart grid system underway.
Read more: ZA: Playbook, Cape Town is the smartest city in Africa
The evolving demands of the ever-discerning consumer continue to give impetus to the private and public sector to offer customised digitisation solutions that meet their needs, David Mphelo, general manager for public sector at MTN Business, told delegates at the Public Sector ICT Forum in Johannesburg.
Mphelo said that as the industry is battling with the full implementation of the IT buzzwords that were conceptualised decades ago such as Big Data and Cloud as the back-end system that supports the complete adoption of these solutions often lags behind.
Read more: ZA: Public private partnerships required to realise true potential of digitisation