The administration centre has achieved "considerable success in helping the Gauteng provincial government and its departments to focus on their core mandate of service delivery", says the provincial head of the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC).
Addressing the media in the wake of the recent state of the province address, Gauteng finance and economic affairs MEC Paul Mashatile said the centre has "built an illustrious profile for itself as a pioneer of public sector innovation".
According to Mashatile, the GSSC's role "has ceased to be merely that of back-office support, but rather a strategic value driver for government".
He went on to list some of the centre's focus areas for the coming financial year, among them implementing an online tendering process as part of the centre's Supplier Relationship Management tool.
Mashatile, however, neglected to make any direct mention of the centre's challenges, which have been conceded to by the province's premier.
These include a historical inability to deal with the backlog in the provincial licence bookings, as well as a two-week crash last year that is yet to be explained to the public.
The only reference made to these matters is a statement by the MEC that "we have drastically reduced the waiting times for test dates on motorcycles and light motor vehicles. We will now focus greater energy on realising these same successes as it relates to the heavy duty motor vehicle licences." He did not provide any further details and did not clarify the extent of the current provincial backlog.
With reference to the centre's crash, the GSSC's communications team told ITWeb it had been found that a computer virus caused the two-week downtime at the centre and that "there was no malicious intention" involved. However, the incident led to an IT security review being undertaken.
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