Nirvesh Sooful has resigned as Cape Town's CIO after steering the municipality's IT for more than 10 years. He says he has not decided on what his future holds yet, but wants to finish his MBA first.
Sooful, arguably the country's best known local government CIO, developed a name for himself by steering Cape Town through its SAP ERP implementation that went live in 2003.
He is also known for his often outspoken views on the use of technology in municipalities, his support for open source and his belief that technology can be used to alleviate the plight of the poor.
However, his strong views did not endear him to some of the higher echelons of the municipal bureaucracy. For the past three years, he had not signed an employment contract as he felt the various restructurings the city had undergone and the subsequent offers in terms of title and conditions offered did not reflect the role that he played.
"That was part of the frustration I have generally felt when dealing with government bureaucracies in general. Now that I have turned 40 and I have been in government employ for more than 16 years (six years with Transnet), I think it is time for me to move on," he says.
Idea cramming
Sooful says his head is "crammed" with ideas on innovation and business that he would like to explore, but has not yet committed himself to anything just yet.
Apart from the SAP ERP implementation, Sooful was also instrumental in getting the Smart Cape project off the ground and for being the force behind Cape Town embarking on a R400 million project to lay fibre optic cable throughout the city.
"While the ERP project was hugely satisfying in that it transformed the city into a processed-based organisation, I am particularly proud of the Smart Cape project, which is still the only one of its kind in the country," he says.
Sooful says the Smart Cape project proves that poor people can quickly learn to use technology and that it has an important role to play in socio-economic development. Some 135 000 people use the Smart Cape system by accessing it through the city's libraries.
He says the fibre optic network that is about to be laid should have started about three years ago. He notes that it would make Cape Town a world leader in making cheap and abundant bandwidth available for companies, municipal services and innovation.
"But that is the nature of a bureaucracy: it takes a long time to get something going."
Into the IT age
In an e-mail sent to his staff yesterday, Sooful wrote: "When I joined local government, the use of information technology was in its infancy. Rudimentary e-mail systems were in place, financial general ledger systems were the main business systems in use, and generally only accessed by the finance people. All other information sat on individual PCs and departmental LANs. Information was generally shared on paper."
Sooful said he and his staff had transformed that into what is probably the most connected government organisation in this country, where systems capability cuts across almost every business process.
"All information is available to everyone on the network from integrated centralised systems. Integrated information is accessible via PCs, messaging platforms, intranets, Web services, call centres, mobile phones, etc. Every month, more and more ICT capability is made available," Sooful said in his e-mail.
He handed in his resignation on Friday and is now serving a month's notice.
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