THE Gauteng provincial government has set up the Gauteng shared service centre to provide a foundation for integrated service delivery and e-government. CEO Mike Roussos says the centre will provide support services to 95 provincial government departments. It includes services in areas such as IT, financial services, human resources, procurement, risk and internal audit.
Moving internal audit to the centre has already resulted in better corporate governance and improved controls, says Roussos.
He says the centre contains a sophisticated data centre and document management centre, with local area and wide area network (WAN) capabilities.
Citrix thin client software has been implemented at the centre, which will enable users to access services from any department using any type of device.
The planning phase of the centre started in 1999 when consulting firm PriceWaterhouse-Coopers was appointed to carry out a needs analysis and provide guidelines.
It became operational in 2001.
The strategy was to focus on projects that would achieve a rapid return on investment.
All government entities in the province already had their own legacy systems in place. The underlying databases in various departments contain information in different formats and do not necessarily talk to each other.
The aim is to create a central, credible database eventually to which the departmental databases can be linked.
Most departments already had local area networks in place and some had existing links with their own subsidiary entities.
A WAN provided links between the departments, but it was inefficient and needed to be revamped, says Roussos.
"We built on what was already there to make the WAN more functional."
By January next year, all the provincial government departments will be connected to a network environment that is a lot faster and has all the necessary security and disaster-recovery processes in place. It will also provide a connection to the state IT agency network.
A facility to monitor faults, virus attacks and other problems on the network, and broadcast maintenance data like antivirus updates, will be fully implemented across all the departments.
Other projects include the implementation of an enterprise resource planning system to provide central e-procurement and strategic sourcing services to the departments, using SAP Procure to Pay software. But each department makes its own decisions as to what goods it purchases, says Roussos.
He says about half of the 95 departments already have access to the procurement service.
A plan is afoot to centralise some HR functionality and allow employees to access information such as leave details, and to update personal details online.
The centre will also provide a knowledge base to provide support in areas such as labour legislation, and this is already in progress, says Roussos.
"We started migrating certain HR and financial functions in September 2002 and have about 1100 people providing services."
Another big project is a government portal for citizens and businesses. The first step will be to implement the technology and set up the websites, to initially provide static information.
Quelle: AllAfrica, 06.11.2003
