December 02, 2015
Every year, the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) hosts the Government Technology Conference, fondly become known as GovTech.
GovTech is a premium Information and Communications Technology (ICT) event for thought-leaders to showcase their innovations, have thoughtful conversations with breakaway groups to expose new thinking and different takes on solutions – and of course, showcase some of the ‘cool tech’ developed by their sponsors (Microsoft for example, is an Executive Partner).
In the ongoing quest to find practical and progressive solutions for a developing nation using ICT tools, Govtech draws from some of the greatest minds in the ICT arena for a common cause – how do we connect communities for development and growth.
At this year’s event, held again at Durban’s Inkosi Luthuli International Convention Centre, the theme was all about service delivery, focusing on three distinct areas namely youth empowerment, SMME development and innovation in government. All of which serve to enable government to deliver the National Development Plan through the power of technology.
The event attracts around 1400 representatives from across national, provincial and local government, as well as the private sector.
As one of Microsoft’s key partners and part of their Equity Equivalent Programme, Chillisoft showcased two of our products – Adisa and Internodal, both of which assist the South African Government to improve service delivery by using the applications we have built, in their specific sectors.
Adisa is a water monitoring system developed as a mobile app to support water service providers.
Due to most water service operations occurring outside of formal office conditions, operational performance monitoring and reporting is paper-based, requiring an eventual physical transfer of data.
This naturally resulted in lost data, a delay in tasks being actioned and an inability to recall historic information. Reporting was non-existent and delayed receipt of data made it almost impossible to implement any action plans timeously. Adisa changed that.
Adisa has been architected and written in such a way that it allows water service operators to transmit issues and information in real-time, even over less than ideal connectivity like high latency, unstable GPRS, and can do so via tablet or smartphone. The result is timeous intervention when necessary as well as the ability to manipulate data to spot trends and produce meaningful reporting.
We also introduced Internodal.
Internodal is a data analytics tool, built to support the enterprise decision maker by collating and connecting datasets.
Most enterprises have their data spread across many databases, with systems built on top of each other. What this ultimately does is hide the gems within the data, making it difficult to isolate key relationships for better decision making.
Internodal offers a bigger and better, more comprehensive view of each data source by using a graph model.
This ultimately allows you to unlock value from existing data and determine the relationships between these ‘nodes’.
By taking these two technologies to the government, we’re looking to help them modernise practices across different service delivery sectors – in turn helping to improve the lives of everyday South Africans.
More information about GovTech can be found on www.govtech.co.za
