ICT Expenditure Review with a focus on SITA Services – Infographic

This spending review explores if the original model of having a centralised stated owned IT agency is working or not. There are concerns that, far from being a source of efficiency, SITA adds to the cost and reduces the efficiency of IT-spend in government. Additionally, the centralising of IT-functions also centralised the risk and increased the systemic costs of any failure by SITA to achieve the efficiencies that centralisation was supposed to deliver. SITA mandate requires that their service catalogue and pricing be reviewed regularly to support evolving trends and technology which is currently not happening resulting in the inconsistent pricing of services government consumers. Overall, there is a lack of alignment and planning of ICT projects and spending with programme objectives and engagement with SITA to enhance enterprise architecture objectives. Over the five-year period 2016/17 to 2021/22 expenditure on ICT across provincial and national government amounted to R97.5 billion and constituted 5% of government’s total procurement spending (Spending on Goods and Services and Capital payments). By centralising the procurement of Office software and Operating system software could result in savings of up to R73 million per year in the medium term. Savings on migrating all govt landlines to VoIP solutions could result in savings of up to R1.1 billion per annum over the medium term. Technical report Infographic