GSSC downplays system crash

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 22 Aug 2007

Ahead of a shared services conference hosted by the Gauteng Shared Service Centre (GSSC), the centre has said it should not be judged by one incident.

This follows last week's revelation that it was down for two weeks at the start of this month, in all probability due to a computer virus. The shutdown impacted negatively on already huge licence booking backlogs, and jeopardised provincial payrolls for 120 000 state employees.

The forensic investigation into the incident continues. However, GSSC IT GM Lemmy Chappie says this is not what should be taken into the Shared Services in the Public Sector Africa conference, at the Sandton Convention Centre, which kicks off today.

"Shared services have been up and running for five to six years and this is the first incident of its kind," says Chappie. "Every model has its pros and cons, and once you have a concept where many things are in a central place, you do have ups and downs."

Chappie says the GSSC deliberately shut down its systems from the outside IT environment at the time of the crash, as it wanted to contain whatever was causing the problem.

"The environment is used by the whole province. We were up and running - we were just isolated."

Chappie points out that, while the GSSC can ensure a "clean" IT environment within its structures, because the whole province feeds into it, it is not always possible to prevent infection, for example by a virus, from outside sources.

He said as per the contract the centre has in place with Symantec, the anti-virus solutions provider was brought in "as soon as we [the GSSC] thought it [the infection] could be malicious".

Providing a benchmark

According to Chappie, other provinces in the country, as well as the IT sector's Sector Education and Training Authority, are looking towards a shared services structure as a more effective business model.

In a recent review, "most [government] departments were totally inward-focused, with up to 70% of the budget spent internally," he explains. "Now they are saying let's not duplicate and let's move those back-office functions to the GSSC."

Chappie says the GSSC is leading the pack in providing shared services for government.

"The mandate for the GSSC is to transform government in a way that we are able to improve service delivery by double or even more." He explains that this includes interacting with suppliers at all hours. IT is what allows the centre to operate in line with business principles, he notes.

"We are moving away from the traditional way of doing things. Eventually we will change legislation if we need to do that to deliver."

He explains that legislation can sometime impede shared service functions as many departments still use legacy systems that have to be complied with. "We may need to move away from x to get to y - that is why change management is so critical in shared services."

He believes one of the GSSC's biggest mistakes was that it did not embark on change management right from inception, but only later. "We did not realise how important that element was.

Crash course

"The crash has actually taught us a thing or two," says Chappie. "We have put in place some measures to ensure it does not happen again, although you never say never. It is a lesson learnt. It is key in terms of business continuity."

Chappie points out that the GSSC was able to draw upon its business continuity plans in order to keep things ticking over, albeit at a slower rate, when the systems did go down.

However, he notes that the disaster recovery plan was not invoked because the cause of the initial crash had not yet been established and the centre did not want the contamination to spread.