For Sulieman Patel, the acting CIO of the Department of Public Works, a single, national ICT ministry would go a long way to fostering government innovation in South Africa. Patel, speaking to Brainstorm at an IDC cloud and datacentre event in Johannesburg recently, said if one looked at countries like Egypt, which has a single ICT ministry, it is now a forerunner in providing skills.

“If you look at e-government in countries like Ghana and Kenya, there’s so much superb stuff happening and it’s all driven through a single ministry of information and communications technology.”  Patel swept the audience along with his enthusiasm, and constantly emphasised that collaboration, and optimisation, would help the government serve its citizens. He said Sita had had some successes, ‘but there was a lot more optimisation that can happen’. “When you look at the bottleneck of the state…I think the first problem is that there’s no collaboration between the three tiers of government.

“My colleagues come back to me and say there’s no money, but there’s so much money in the state, but I don’t think we’re utilising it efficiently and effectively.” He said they were now leveraging technology in his department to get visibility of the roughly 110 000 buildings that it owns. “How can you have huge buildings like Parliament and the legislature (with no visibility),” he asked.