The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) has awarded an Arivia.kom consortium, including Cornastone, a three-year information technology outsource contract to support its applications and maintain its infrastructure.
This is a strategic move aimed at enabling the second-largest national government department to refine its governance of precious natural resources and the management of stakeholders, and to enhance its services to the public.
”In the midst of restructuring and refining its operations, [the department] is aligning its information systems to facilitate its new functions and regulatory role,” says Director General of Water Affairs and Forestry Mike Muller.
”The delivery of an effective and reliable information systems service is critical in a department as large and widely distributed as [the] DWAF. Outsourcing our requirements means we can focus on achieving our goals in water service provision, water resource management and forestry promotion and regulation.”
The department is undergoing a number of structural and functional changes.
”The local government elections in 2000 made it possible for local government to assume full operational responsibility for water and sanitation services, as required by the Constitution. As a result, the role of [the] DWAF is changing to that of a sector leader, supporter and regulator,” says Muller.
”[The] DWAF’s new role as a regulatory body makes access to accurate financial information and data on the status of water and forestry reserves and management crucial,” says Gundo Manyatshe, chief information officer at the DWAF. ”On assessing our IT competency’s ability to match our requirements, however, we found the strategy the department had been following unsustainable on a number of fronts.
”Our IT resource base has been eroded over the years. In an attempt to fill our requirements, we entered into a number of ‘body shop’ contracts, but these have proved costly and ineffective. Since remuneration was based on input rather than output, there was no way to control deliverables. We could not put SLAs in place, and there was no single point of accountability.
”To improve efficiencies, cut costs, obtain predictable expenditure and have a single point of accountability, we decided to outsource the IT function. Since our resources and IT infrastructure are widely distributed, we needed a service provider that had an adequate geographic footprint. Arivia.kom fits the criteria. In addition, it came in with reasonable costing, leveraging its economies of scale in terms of the work it is doing for Transnet and Eskom, among others.”
The deal includes support for more than 3 000 desktops and the network and server infrastructure. In addition, Arivia.kom will also support highly specialised applications relating to hydrology, water management and forestry management systems.
The contract was awarded to Arivia.kom in April.