| News article |
| IT in government | 30/07/2001 |
Slow and steady wins the race (article courtesy of Computer Week)
The massive Home Affairs National Identity System (Hanis) project is now well under way -- and it carries some valuable lessons about the way in which large IT projects play out nowadays, both for public and private sector strategists.
Single view of the customer?
The investigation into the merits or otherwise of smart cards was led by the Departments of Home Affairs, Communications, Social Development and Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Home Affairs issued a request for information in July last year and was overwhelmed to receive around 60 responses. The recommendation of the lead departments is now with cabinet and the all-important decision is expected, Monyeki says with crossed fingers, this month.
The vision is that the smart card should provide the single interface between citizen and government. Each department will be responsible for its own application on the smart card, and it's been recommended that government be responsible for the first issue of the card, with citizens paying for subsequent replacements.
Monyeki says that 18 months from cabinet approval is an "optimistic but manageable" time frame to produce the first card. Among the big questions to be answered will be the direction taken as regards the e-government strategy to place the citizen at the centre of all government strategy.
Envious corporates will note that this will, in theory at least, give government the elusive "single view of the customer".
|
After what seems an astonishingly long gestation period, it now seems true to say that the long-awaited Hanis project is on track. The tender for this massive project, worth some R930 million all told and which will see the identity records for all South Africans being digitised, was finally awarded in February 1999 to the Marpless Consortium.
The consortium is led by Plessey and Marubeni Corporation. NEC provides the automated fingerprint identity system (Afis), with Unisys fulfilling the systems integrator role. Polaroid was to supply the two-dimensional bar-coded ID cards. After the tender was awarded, contract negotiations began and the contract was finally signed in November 1999.
Part of the reason for the long delays in this process were the obvious needs to scope the project properly; the delay also reflects the intense lobbying that took place between the departments -- a process in which Department of Communications' Andile Ngcaba is said to have played a pivotal role. Depending on who you speak to, the lobbying was to persuade departments of the merits of a single ID card which held the bulk of the information each citizen needs to interface with a range of key government departments, or it was the departments themselves trying to get their own sections on the ID card (see box for details).
 Whatever the case, the concept of the smart card won out over the two-dimensional barcode, which meant that Polaroid had to drop out of the final contract. This was possible, notes Patrick Monyeki, the department's chief director of IT, because of the very modular and scalable architecture chosen. This is surely one of the first things any large IT project has to be designed to deal with -- expect the basics to change at least once even before implementation begins.
Monyeki speaks highly of the architectural model put forward by Unisys, which allowed the rest of the project to go ahead while the smart card issues are sorted out. "In a sense," he adds, "the length of the procurement process -- which I see as the most risky part -- is actually a help. It allows you to spend time with your business colleagues and really understand what they need."
After the contract was signed it was necessary, says Monyeki, to revisit the business definitions again. "Because of the time lag," he notes, "we had to be absolutely sure that we understood what the business requirements now were so that the IT fitted with them."
The infrastructure module for Afis is now complete and the various subsystems are currently being tested. The basic system is likely to be up and running by December. Says Monyeki: "We may be out by a month, but probably not more. It's a relatively academic question because there still won't be a card yet -- we'll be busy with the capturing of the existing information for a while."
The Pillars of Hanis
Two key problems formed the solution:
- The huge (45 million and growing at a rate of 7 000 a day) fingerprint database. Manual filing and checking is no longer viable.
- ID books have become easy to forge -- all that needs changing is the photo -- and the policy of decentralisation has meant that only the personal particulars page is of any use.
The main elements (or pillars) of Hanis, and so the solutions to the problem are:
- AFIS or the automated fingerprint identification system
- ID card, which will replace the ID book. If the smart card option is endorsed by cabinet, each department will be able to load an application onto the smart card issued by Home Affairs
- Integration of Afis, the ID card and the Population Register -- likely to be one the bigger IT challenges of the first decade of the new millennium.
by James van den Heever
|
|
