Besides the obvious connectivity and access the world of ICT brings, ICTs are playing a greater role in the facilitation of global competition and consequently, in foreign direct investment, making a solid telecommunications infrastructure necessary for any country that wishes to compete in the global arena.
The World Competitiveness Report certainly highlighted some strides of improvement in terms of SA's global competitiveness ranking - with the country boasting an overall improvement from 46th place in 2005 to 44th in 2007.
However, the 2008-2009 report* indicates SA slipped to 45th place - demonstrating the need for further improvements in overall government and business efficiency which reiterates the country's efforts to promote and facilitate global competitiveness in SA.
However, the economic climate needs to be taken into consideration. After several years of rapid and almost unhampered growth, the global economic landscape is changing. Rising food and energy prices, a major international financial crisis, and the related slowdown in the world's economies are confronting governments locally and internationally with new economic management challenges and the need to manage risk. As such, government and corporations alike need to mitigate such risk to be able to take advantage of new technologies to improve business efficiencies, provide competitor advantage and maximise customer satisfaction while the economic landscape continues to change. But how?
OSS control
In simplistic terms, software development is about the management of risk, in that a correctly implemented software solution should mitigate the risk associated with specific business processes and challenges. Within this context, open source software (OSS) is an important element in providing governmental departments with a measure of control in managing the technical risks associated with bespoke or customised development.
It is not an issue of cost reduction that is driving the adoption of OSS within the development community, but rather one of control and risk mitigation.
Greg Vercellotti is executive director of Dariel Solutions
This risk mitigation is engendered by a variety of elements - primary among these being community involvement. In general, OSS has wider access to skilled developers and technically literate users than proprietary software - simply due to the current market penetration, the nature of OSS development and global source forges. While sometimes imperfect, due to the communal nature of OSS development and the fact that source code is visible, OSS development has proven to be effective in terms of reducing the number of 'bugs' and technical challenges faced by developers.
This, in turn, affords software developers the opportunity to speedily resolve issues and defects on behalf of clients. Thus, it is not an issue of cost reduction that is driving the adoption of OSS within the development community, but rather one of control and risk mitigation - essential to any government organisation, municipal, provisional or state operating in today's complex environment.
Software development houses are not product vendors, but service providers. Therefore, their primary interest should be the use of OSS libraries or standalone modules as a powerful set of tools and as part of their technical 'arsenal' in addressing government requirements. Similar to what the world has seen with the global uptake of the Internet; when OSS is recognised as another tool - rather than a social movement - we will know that the technology and the market it seeks to reach has truly attained maturity and critical mass uptake, a key component in reducing risk and increasing competitiveness.
* The Global Competitive Report 2008-2009, World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
** Greg Vercellotti is executive director of Dariel Solutions.
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