Single view of citizen by 2010?

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 27 Jun 2007

Home Affairs director-general Mavuso Msimang has ambitions of having an IT system providing a "single view of the citizen" and of foreign visitors in place by 2010, when his three-year tenure at the department ends.

"That is a must and very 'do-able'," the former State IT Agency CEO says. "These are things that really have to happen; it depends on political will rather than the technology."

Msimang wants transversal access to all the information about citizens kept in various stovepipes at the department.

This may seem a tall order for a department as paper-based and dysfunctional as Home Affairs, and Msimang confesses the "IT problems at Home Affairs are unbelievable".

Msimang bewailed the low utilisation of IT in his department in a wide-ranging interview with ITWeb this week, saying much of the department's processes were still paper-based. Existing IT systems are utilised at 5% of capacity and contain only the bare essentials of ID book applications and the like.

Transversal tech

He adds the department has to gear itself for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, hence the need to revamp the immigration directorate and the introduction of technology to have a single view of visitors and better identify people who seek to bring scarce skills to SA.

Transversal technology is key here too. Msimang says there is little information flow between his immigration officials, the South African Revenue Service customs officers and police based inside the same airport's arrivals hall. This simply will not do in the 21st Century, he notes.

Similarly, other government departments would benefit from access to Home Affairs systems.

"It is a beautiful vision. It is also real. You can do that today," Novell SA MD Stafford Masie said about the technology at a Microsoft interoperability event last month.

Speaking about the prison system rather than Home Affairs - but equally applicable, he said: "What they need is not a vendor, but a referencing mechanism that can access anything related to [citizen X] transversely, irrespective of where it is stored. What they need to do is service-orientate X away from the infrastructure and more to the business level."

Masie said most ministers and senior government leaders he has spoken to want service-oriented architecture of the type described to achieve departmental and interdepartmental interoperability and transversal data access.

"Everyone wants it. I can tell you every single minister wants this: Social Development wants a single view of a grant recipient. There are children out there with 40 mothers. There are women from Zimbabwe who come here to have babies to get the child grant. They come here once a month to get the money then they are gone. We have no way [at present] to ask: is this a citizen?"

Disaster recovery

Before this can happen, many of the basics must be fixed at Home Affairs. The department needs to start using the IT it has, migrate away from paper-based processes and enforce electronic data management, says Msimang.

It needs to create and use an assets register and secure its server rooms, purge dirty data and prevent recontamination. With the exception of the Home Affairs National Identification System, which also needs a technology refresh, the department also has no disaster recovery means.

"What I'm painting here is a true, but pretty bleak picture," Msimang says.