GijimaAst lands huge SITA contract

Johannesburg, 26 Oct 2007

A GijimaAst-led consortium has won the single largest tender awarded by the State IT Agency (SITA). The deal will see GijimaAst implement the "Who am I Online" project, central to the turnaround of the Department of Home Affairs (DHA).

The value of the contract has not been released.

The agreement is for the design, supply, installation and maintenance of an integrated core business system, based on a "general live capture concept", consisting of the required integrated core business application; a graphical management information tool; and a set of integrated client services consoles for the DHA front-offices, locally and internationally.

The "Who am I Online" project is central to the DHA`s systems renewal programme. According to the DHA Web site projects page, the department envisages changing its manual processes, where paper is the main interface with its clients and systems, to a total paperless environment where all transactions are completed online and in real-time.

"This contract is the single largest to be awarded by SITA and the Department of Home Affairs, and will significantly increase GijimaAst Group`s revenue stream for the next five years," says Robert Gumede, executive chairman of GijimaAst Group.

"The successful negotiation of the supplier agreement will be finalised in the next few weeks."

GijimaAst`s competition for the deal included Dimension Data, Unisys, arivia.kom and Business Connexion.

Crisis control

<B>"Who am I" objectives:</B>

Implement online registration to capture the following digitally:
* Photos, fingerprints, signature and voice
* Demographics
* Supporting documents
* Introduce an integrated core business system (incorporating civic and immigration with a single logical database of all persons)
* Eliminate manual and tedious processes
* Reduce the vast amounts of paper
* Ensure acceptable fingerprints quality at offices of application
* Improve turnaround times for "enabling documents" applications
* Eradicate future "back record conversion"
* Improve overall security
* Improve agility through the use of workflow
* Improve agility through the use of workflow and compliance to service-oriented architecture
* Improve integrity through the enforcement of business rules
* Introduce the general live capture concept with highly configurable counters housing integrated client service consoles, backed by fault-tolerant controllers for offline processing at any office in order to address the office counters, queuing and "look and feel"
Source: Department of Home Affairs

Earlier this week, the Democratic Alliance expressed concern about the department`s finances and IT. It said director-general Mavuso Msimang had told Parliament that his department`s "most serious problem is that - along with issues of endemic corruption, poor capacity and staff attitudes - it urgently needs to address its poor systems, processes and other IT matters".

DA Home Affairs spokesman Mark Lowe says while this was "not news to the Democratic Alliance, I am grateful to the DG for again speaking plainly and frankly, and I assured him of the DA`s full support in addressing the crisis that is the Department of Home Affairs".

Lowe says his party hopes sufficient funding has been secured to address "the systemic failures in the department`s systems..." He adds that he has tabled a series of Parliamentary questions to ascertain the situation.

A consultant, assisting Msimang in turning the department around last month, said the National Treasury had effectively given the department a "blank cheque" to fix its problems.

A senior departmental official at the same time suggested the bill the cheque would pay would be around R2 billion.

Winning streak

Meanwhile, GijimaAst has been appointed the national ICT support service company for mining giant Anglo American`s local and international operations. According to Mining Weekly, GijimaAst CEO Jonas Bogoshi says the partnership has also resulted in the company partnering with Anglo Platinum to provide ICT support services.

The company has also secured a R960 million contract with Absa, the big-four bank. The contract, which was signed last year, includes the provision of ICT outsourcing services for a five-year period.