The State IT Agency (SITA) has had a long journey towards consolidating and co-ordinating South Africa’s ICT resources to realise cost savings, enhance interoperability and ultimately enable government through the agency.

“Previous attempts to transform SITA were plagued by frequent leadership changes which led to overlapping strategies that were not fully implemented,” says Portia Matsena, acting executive Industry Transformation at SITA, who will be presenting on SITA’s transformation journey at Experience Micro Focus 2019, to be held at the Inanda Club, in Sandton, on 29 August.

According to her, past strategic programmes experienced common pitfalls, such as the direction changed before the programme was fully executed, or the programmes were domain-specific, and did not incorporate a holistic view of SITA’s operations.

“A structured approach was undertaken to refine SITA’s current business model,” says Matsena. “The first step was to establish design principles, and align on the guiding principles that will steer the overall process. Next, we had to agree on the evaluation process, and align on the criteria to assess products and services.”

The next step, she says, was to assess product and services through evaluation processes, to assess the business lines, following which we needed to calculate the impact on SITA as is, and work out the financial, reputational and practical impacts of the potential changes. Finally, we had to propose a new business model, and present it for board approval.

So what does the SITA of the future look like? According to Matsena, it will be a SITA that grows in client base, grows its internal resources to meet client demand, grows its innovative service offering and grows its internal capability through targeted professional development.

It also aims to become an IT centre of excellence, a driver of innovation and economic development both in respect of participation in the local market and international trade, as well as an organisation that changes its primary deliverable to the ecosystem in the form of thought leadership and not necessarily in the form of technical operations.

In addition, she says, in future it will be a SITA with a capability that is neither public nor private sector, but one that has employees with a calibre similar to private sector and can provide consultancy to government using effective service delivery matrices.

“We aim to become a self-sustainable entity that creates internal capacity in government and collaborates with private sector to be able to generate national ICT capacity that can improve society in general, and one that is able to invest in its employees, infrastructure, technology and assets.”

During her presentation, Matsena will unpack SITA’s journey, discussing the pitfalls and successes, as well as the SITA of the future and all the benefits it will bring.

Experience Micro Focus 2019

We look forward to meeting, networking and sharing insights with all who have registered to attend the second Annual Experience Micro Focus Universe taking place at Inanda Club on 29 August 2019. To find out more about the event, click here.