The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Police was briefed by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) yesterday to assess the role these agencies play – and heard that major IT projects are still undeployed up to 13 years after they started.
SITA’s briefing was aimed at tracking progress on the implementation of projects such as the Integrated Case Document Management System, otherwise known as e-docket, which started in 2002 and yet to be completed. This particular project is thought to have cost R148-million between 2011 and 2014.
The National Network Upgrade Programme (NNUP), meanwhile, has been in the works since 2005 and had been allocated R1,8-billion as at the end of 2012.
A contract with Saab Grintek Defence to deploy an integrated mobile vehicle data command and control system has been cancelled, and Saab Grintek is now challenging this in court.
The CSIR briefed the Committee on whether the 2014 Memorandum of Understanding between SAPS and CSIR was meeting its intended objectives.
According to the CSIR, the MOU “is a formal step towards the longer-term objective to establish a Safety and Security Evaluation and Research Institute that will perform independent, ongoing scientific and operational research and evaluation tasks and provide scientific decision support services to the SAPS as and when required”.
