EDITORIAL: IT bungles hold back service delivery

Technological failures in the government are hindering the advancement of programmes critical for the delivery of services. Three examples of these costly failures were visible last week — and the fear is that they may be the tip of the iceberg.

The department of home affairs, MPs learnt, has had to revert to its outdated home affairs national identification system (Hanis) because the international company, Idemia, contracted to install a new system has failed to deliver. It was supposed to install an automated biometric identification system (Abis), which would add eye and facial recognition to the fingerprint and photographic identification provided by Hanis.

This failure has compromised the department’s ability to fight fraud and corruption. The project dates back to 2017 and was expected to go live in 2019.

Then, parliament’s finance committee was updated on the R2.4bn project by the National Treasury to implement an integrated financial management system (IFMS) across national and provincial governments which, apart from having purchased software, has not delivered anything concrete for more than a decade.

Technological advances have overtaken initial plans and now the issue is back to the drawing board. As deputy public service and administration Chana Pilane-Majake noted, this long delay has held back the digitisation, modernisation and improvement of connectivity across the government. Departments have been restrained from embarking on their own projects because an IFMS was ostensibly in the pipeline.

The third example was the department of justice & constitutional development losing more than 1,200 files as a result of a security breach of its IT systems. According to the information regulator, this was because it failed to renew a licence that expired in 2020, which would enable it to monitor unusual activity and to back up log files.

A further example is the antiquated cadastral system used by the department of mineral resources & energy, which only recently decided to issue a tender for an automated off-the-shelf system rather than a bespoke one that it has been insisting on and that would take years to develop. The mining industry has been pleading for an off-the-shelf system for years, saying that the absence of an effective cadastral system has inhibited mining exploration and contributed to a huge backlog in processing applications for prospecting and mining rights, and the renewal of mining rights.

Each of these failures — and who knows if there are more — has their own particular cause, but they suggest a historic breakdown in the relationship between government departments and the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), the centralised entity for the procurement of technology for the government and management of its IT infrastructure. Departments, especially the department of home affairs, have complained bitterly for years about Sita’s poor performance but regrettably it appears that their attempts to go it alone have also failed dismally.

A centralised agency makes sense in terms of the concentration of expertise, uniformity across government systems and the economies of scale, but poor performance will be a hindrance to the technological advancement of the government, which must ensure that the agency is fit for purpose and able to respond with agility to departmental needs.