Cape CIO selection on track

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 29 Oct 2008

The City of Cape Town has started a short-listing process to select a replacement CIO.

Mike Marsden, the city's executive director for service delivery, says the advertising process has been completed. “We have received some impressive applications,” he adds.

The city is putting together a shortlist of candidates and plans to follow up with interviews and assessments. “An appointment is expected to be made before the end of the year,” says Marsden.

While the city did not list the names of the possible candidates, it did say all processes and projects would continue as planned.

Nirvesh Sooful resigned as Cape Town's CIO in June, after steering the municipality's technology initiatives for more than 10 years. His most popular project was the SAP ERP implementation that he spearheaded for Cape Town.

According to SAP, it was the first implementation of a complete SAP suite of solutions with revenue management focusing on key services in a unicity in SA. “The City of Cape Town is now poised to become the forerunner in the national strategy aimed at developing e-government solutions addressing the needs of citizens,” the company said at the time.

Sooful was also instrumental in getting the Smart Cape project off the ground and was the force behind Cape Town embarking on a R400 million project to lay fibre-optic cable throughout the city.

Last year, Cape Town was listed as one of the world's top 21 intelligent communities, according to the Intelligent Communities Forum, a New York-based think tank that researches and promotes the broadband economy.