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CXO Advisor Facilitates at the Government CIO Conference
On the 31st March to the 3rd April, over 130 Government CIOs got together to thrash out their input into the upcoming Government ICT strategy. The Government CIO Summit was convened expressly to enable Government CIOs to contribute their thinking on the six major areas of the nascent Government ICT strategy, which were postulated by the GITOC (Government Information Technology IT Officers Council).
CXO Advisor facilitated the ICT cost management session, and was impressed in the clarity of thought and the genuine desire to optimise ICT costs while not impacting services.
While inputs from CIOs to the ICT strategy remain out of the public domain for now, we wait with anticipation for the publishing of the Government ICT strategy, which should give clarity and direction for the next five years to CIOs, Director’s General and also to the ICT industry in general in South Africa.
A plenary session held on the Thursday allowed CIOs to participate in outlining the issues faced by Government IT departments around citizen access, service delivery, ICT costs, capabilities and performance. These issues were then used over the next few days in break-away sessions for each of the six focus areas, to define the CIOs’ thinking on the strategic themes, objectives and programmes related to each of the six areas.
This input from CIOs will provide the backbone to the Government ICT strategy, which is expected to be presented for discussion and approval to the Honourable Richard Baloyi, Minister of Public Service and Administration.
On Saturday Minister Baloyi addressed the CIOs, explaining that his first priority had been the stabilisation and re-purposing of SITA (the State IT Agency). This work now being complete, the focus now shifts to the Government ICT strategy. Minister Baloyi related the analogy of a pencil – while one side is used for writing, the other side can be used for erasing. And that’s his approach, here. Nothing that has come before should be considered as untouchable – it could be erase in this summit. This became known as ‘the minister’s pencil’ to many delegates, and it was used freely in some of the sessions that followed.
The aims of the ICT strategy are to give common purpose to Government IT Departments, to enable sharing of knowledge, intellectual property, skills and IT experience across all government departments and agencies. Foremost in the thinking of delegates was the need to share knowledge and experience (and indeed applications and services), so that duplication of effort becomes minimal.
Of course the proof of the pudding… and all that. Having a documented strategy is only 5% of the answer – the real challenge is in the implementation. That’s where we can help, and that’s where we’ll see if the Summit was valuable to the citizens of South Africa.
