IT skills will rescue Home Affairs

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 25 Jun 2007

Transformation will not come to the dysfunctional Home Affairs department unless some changes are made in senior management, says director-general Mavuso Msimang.

Msimang says the "IT problems at Home Affairs are unbelievable".

He hopes to replace some of his more doddering mandarins with new hires from the private sector. "The key person will be an ICT person and they don't come cheap."

In an interview with ITWeb this morning, the DG and former State IT Agency CEO said the department lacked an enterprise architecture, its business processes were a shambles and the IT infrastructure - with one exception - was "in tatters".

The exception was the much media-maligned Home Affairs National Identification System (Hanis) - that documents every citizen from birth to death and every visitor from arrival to departure.

In search of stars

Explaining the challenges facing the department and its ongoing re-engineering, with the help of a number of task teams consisting of private sector consultants and treasury officials, Msimang says the changes would not stick unless there was inspired leadership.

"The problem lies largely at the top," he says. "Capacity is very constrained at the senior level. Fixing it will require a team effort."

Part of the re-engineering process is to team the consultants with departmental officials. Msimang says this may help find some bright stars. "We will identify people with management potential and take the risk to promote them and move aside those who lack the capability."

But this will take time. "This can't be done at short notice. How quickly can you get people in place?" Msimang says he's not sure he'll find the calibre of leaders he seeks in the public service - not because they do not exist - but because they would be unlikely to take sideways transfers to come clean up the mess at Home Affairs at their existing salary level.

Calling the private sector

For this reason, Msimang is casting his eyes on the private sector. Msimang says he will need to pay them market-related rates and he has had some talks with the private sector to provide top-up funding beyond what the public sector offers.

This approach is not unique. In the early years of SA's democracy, the safety and security department hired retail mogul Meyer Kahn to revamp the police, with the private sector paying his salary. Msimang says he has already had some discussion with businesses and they are amenable to the idea - if only out of self-interest.

Hanis, Msimang says, is working well, but it needs a technology refresh. He says it was a mistake to put out the system's upgrade to tender as it created the impression the technology was to be replaced. He says Hanis is a proprietary system and merely needs an "upgrade so it functions efficiently".

Msimang says he hopes the task teams will have produced sufficient data and planning for him to announce the department's way forward in about three months' time. "All the really standard things need to be put in place to support what comes out of the advice... It is almost as if we are starting from scratch.

"How soon I can make any announcements are a function of resources... there is no silver bullet... These are things that really have to happen, but it depends on political will, rather than technology."