Tshwane launches digital service delivery strategy

Cape Town – The City of Tshwane on Wednesday launched a digital service delivery strategy inspired by “successful municipalities around the world”.

The strategy, dubbed eKaelo, is a thinly disguised challenge to South African metros and municipalities on how to implement solutions such as public Wi-Fi to boost engagement and government response with citizens.

“All digital projects must begin with an understanding of what the needs of the citizens are and how the digital service will benefit their lives. The intended user of the services, whether government employees, policy makers or the general public, should be included in the design process from the very beginning,” says the strategy.

Tshwane’s public Wi-Fi service has 165 000 users per month, and is available at 633 sites, many of those education facilities.

"The Tshwane Free Wi-Fi service not only aligns to the SA Connect objective for 2016 of 'connecting 50% of broadband users at speeds of 10mbps'. It goes further to connect various schools and health facilities through the service, bringing broadband closer to a digitally included citizenry in the City for improved education, economic development and social cohesion," said Zahir Khan, chief operating officer of Project Isizwe, which has been tasked with delivering the connectivity.

Internet access is regarded as an economic driver and the City of Cape Town is considering funding models for a massive broadband roll-out programme. The city said that it spent R250m so far on the programme that is expected to have a R1.2bn price tag.

Here are the City of Tshwane’s 13 digital service plays:

- Understand what people need
- Address the whole experience, from start to finish
- Make it simple and intuitive
- Build the service using agile and iterative practices
- Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery
- Assign one leader and hold that person accountable
- Bring in experienced teams
- Choose a modern technology
- Deploy in a flexible hosting environment
- Automate testing and deployments
- Manage security and privacy
- Use data to drive decisions
- Default to open

"It seems hard to believe that not too long ago, the general public in the City of Tshwane had no real access to free Wi-Fi. Today they are setting records with high-quality videos that are streamed via Wi-Fi TV to be viewed by everyone," Alan Knott-Craig jnr, CEO of Project Isizwe said recently.

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