Outfront Solution Design

Over the past few years I have done a lot of work with local government in South Africa.  I would dearly like to say that it has been a pleasure.  In all my time as a software developer and database designer/implementer I have never seen such a shocking state of disarray.  I actually thought that I had slipped into some sort of horrible nightmare the first time I was exposed to the management systems of some of our municipalities.  The state of the data that is used to run these organizations is not up to date and none of the various components within the system have data that correlates exactly with the next.  These people would be better off moving back to a paper based setup than trying to work with what they have.

The major challenge here lies in the fact that these organizations are usually short on cash.  The irony here is that if they were running efficiently through sane systems, they would probably not have these money problems.  I despair when I see how much money is wasted on commercial systems that never seem to work properly, when the central government could put funding into developing an open source toolset that could be rolled out to all the local government players.  These tailor-made solutions would attract a once-off development cost and a country-wide maintenance plan.  To top it all these could all be linked in together to form a national reporting framework, which would facilitate better government practices.  The solution is simpler than it would first appear to be.

In closing, a unified approach to information systems in all spheres of government would go a long way to solving many of the problems faced by civil servants.  Such systems could be developed at a fraction of the cost of proprietary software, whilst at the same time providing jobs and experience to local budding software engineers (meaning that the expertise necessary to run and maintain said systems would all be at our fingertips).  These systems could generate additional revenue through rolling them out throughout Africa and elsewhere.  Proper systems would also ensure that all data countrywide would conform to a standard and gradually be “scrubbed” to a point where it is clean and usable.  If some of these suggestions are not followed we will plummet over the precipice into data oblivion, never to return.