SITA to open ICT academy

By Bandile Sikwane for SITA
Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2006

The State IT Agency (SITA) plans to set up an ICT academy within 18 months to address skills shortages in SA.

"We do not have requisite capacity in terms of skills in the ICT sector," said Fatima Habib, SITA's chief of shared services, at the executive leadership forum closed session, at the inaugural GovTech conference, at Sun City yesterday.

"[Public service and administration] minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi has charged us to look at what skills will be needed in the next five to 10 years."

Habib noted that the ICT industry's internal poaching of skills has hampered skills retention and growth.

"At the moment, the majority of the ICT industry is robbing Peter to pay Paul," she said. "Some industry players have approached us in this regard, but we are appealing to the whole industry at large to play a role in forming a partnership with the government and SITA to create an ICT academy in SA."

Habib said forming the academy raises issues of costs, location, format and content. "We do not yet have a handle on the nature of the beast. What we are doing now is formulating a document that will bring industry players together in operational discussions. We want to have something up and running in 18 months."

She noted that SITA is looking to get buy-in from industry players and academic institutions that have already done work in this area.

Indian experience

Sulieman Patel, COO for the Middle East and Africa regions at MatrixView, said SA must learn from the Indian experience.

In his keynote address, Patel noted that ICT businesses in India are setting up their own ICT campuses in order to feed talent into their companies.

A skills survey undertaken by ITWeb and Fidentia online during September found IT companies are feeling the pressure of the skills shortage, and a lack of skills is likely to persist in three key areas: configuration and change management, process management and software testing.

Project management, presentation and communication skills, and mentoring were the top three softer skills that management cited as critical to their IT staff's development.