CIO of South Africa’s Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) Norbit Williams has stressed the importance of migration to the cloud in improving the public service delivery.
He was participating in a panel discussion on accelerating cloud adoption in the public sector, hosted at the ITWeb Amazon Web Services Cloud Technology Executive Breakfast 2023 recently and moderated by ITWeb senior news journalist Sibahle Malinga.
Williams said even though the DPE isn’t a direct public-facing department, its enterprises are – and transition to the cloud is vital for service roll out.
The DPE’s mandate is to drive investment, productivity and transformation within the State-Owned Companies (SOCs) that are in its portfolio, which includes Eskom.
According to the DPE website, one of its key roles is to ensure that SOCs “planning and performance, and investments and activities are in line with the government’s medium-term strategic framework and the Minister’s service delivery agreement.”
Cloud-backed service delivery is one of the routes to more effective service delivery to citizens, the DPE claims.
Williams said: “We obviously need to provide some sense, some semblance of what is going on across the entire value chain within the public enterprises environment, and that includes how, Eskom, for instance, will benefit, along with Transnet and Denel, by being part of the digital portfolio we are looking at in order to deliver services and deliver them adequately.”
Kutlwano Chaba, chief digital officer of SALGA (South African Local Government Association), comprising all of the country’s 257 local governments, spoke of the organisation’s dual role in managing its internal strategy focused on public servants, and an external strategy focused on citizen service delivery.
Chaba spoke about the significance of the development of a digital framework for local government and its contribution to the broader undertaking of the organisation to digitalise municipalities.
The framework is used as a reference guide to help municipalities, all of which are at different levels of digital maturity, to begin with cloud adoption and understand what technology resources and skill sets, are required to achieve objectives.
Once internal process efficiency and optimisation requirements are considered, Chaba said SALGA looks at a number of use cases that are critical to make service delivery “… and how the different cloud offerings and technology offerings can make that happen. This is all done in response to- and based on citizen requirements.”
He highlighted the challenge of disparate systems within municipalities, which each spend millions to acquire different citizen engagement platforms.
There is a need for municipalities to have the same systems, same interfaces and approaches, and this is the rationale behind its Connected Citizen programme.
Local government and SALGA are collaborating on the roll out of a standardised citizen-facing app that offers a single channel through which citizens can engage municipalities and track the progress of service delivery.
Investment in cloud and energy
The public sector, like others in South Africa, is challenged by erratic power supply and reliable, renewable energy sources.
It has created a clear opportunity for cloud service providers and hyperscalers to leverage demand.
Rashika Ramlal, public sector country leader, South Africa, AWS, said the company has committed to invest over R46-billion from 2018 to 2029. It has also invested in a 10MW solar power plant in the Northern Cape to support the operation of its datacentre infrastructure and continued business interests in South Africa. The plant is expected to generate up to 28 000MWh of renewable energy per year.
“85% of our utilisation is currently on renewable energy and we are the largest purchaser of renewable energy worldwide, and in addition to that, that renewable plant is going to create 10 megawatts of energy. So we will be servicing ourselves essentially and right now we are using renewable energy anyway, so we will be contributing that to the grid.”
In early April this year, AWS released an economic impact study which indicates AWS’s investment from 2018-2029 will contribute an estimated R80-billion to the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Africa and support an estimated average of more than 5 700 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs at local South African businesses on an annual basis.
South Africa’s Communications and digital technologies minister, Mondli Gungubele said in his keynote at the Executive Breakfast that the government acknowledges the investments made by hyperscalers in cloud technologies.
“We are moving in the right direction, with the reality of the digital economy steadily increasing its GDP contribution, at an average growth of 15.6% and accounts for 45% of global GDP. The emergence of cloud technology has spurred our digital transformation journey and opened a plethora of opportunities in the digital economy.”
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