P2: Interview Part two

Interview part two is to conduct a research in your organisation, particularly for business processes alignment to Provincial Strategic Goals (PSG’s) and services. And, e-Government implementation.

1. (I) What are “best practices” or methods used for the alignment of business processes to PSG’s and services? (P2) Yes, I think the method that we are using is starting with Provincial strategic goals and this is not a best practice but it’s just a method. You come up with PSG’s and from there you allow the business unit within the departments to articulate the contributions to the PSG’s and how they going to reach the goals and objectives. From there you need to start working with the project that will meet PSG’s. It’s not the best practise because business processes are often not determine in that process they usually come later on when people are trying to implement things and the business processes might not be aligned to PSG’s but aligned to the goal of the project and that project might minor a contributor to the over PSG. The best practice again might be to do to do that process again, after you articulated PSG’s and objectives. You start braking down possible services and things that need to happen within the organisation. And, then from there you can start mapping out business processes and the business processes would tell you who is responsible and what project you possible need to be in place and making sure that service is delivered. The best practice partially exists.

2. (I) Follow-up question for the above question; if it does not exist, what would be a right way or approach to align business processes to PSGs and services? (P2) Partially exist.

3. (I) What method or technique is used to classify business processes in your organisations? (P2) I am not aware of anything for me; it is very difficult to

4. (I) Are you aware of organisational core business processes? (P2)Yes /No or not sure.

5. (I) Are you aware of organisational support business processes? (P) Yes /No or not sure.

6. (I) Do you think alignment of business processes in your organisation would be achieved through using the following alignment elements:

Please select relevant rating.

P2 rating

No. Element 1.Strongly disagree

2.Disagree 3.Neither agree nor disagree

4.

Agree

5.Strongly agree

1. RACI method 4

2. Directorates or Chief Directorates

2

3. Departments 3

4. Provincial

Strategic Objective

4

5. Support services 3

6. Core services/

Citizen-centric services

4

Using Likert scale

E-government implementation

1. (I) What would be the impact of implementing e-government initiatives based on the current state of business processes, PSG’s and services across the provincial government? (P2) I think the impact would that we will achieve partially successes and the reason for that we can some successes maybe in rendering technical or technological base solutions. However, they would be some gaps in terms of what is happening at the back-end. So you will succeed in creating presentation area or layer saying these are services that we provide but we will struggle in delivering services efficiently in the background because business processes will be ill-defined roles and responsibilities will be not as firm as we would like to be. If you take a simple service such as applying for a drivers licence. If you do this using e-Government, when the e-Government has been defined, yes you can have an ICT enabling service. But, what ICT is introducing is a lot of efficiencies if you

don’t have roles in the background to define business processes differently, so to work differently, for example; you have to look at e-mail, you have to check this database and you have to do all those processes and responsibilities at the background. All you can do is e-Government is to enable those service but is based on optimal business process and non-existence roles. All you gonna have is just a presentation layer, is not gonna be an efficient service. The danger is that we have now is implementing e-Government services without articulated business services is that we will have partial successes.

2. (I) What would be an effective way to implement e-government strategy initiatives across the Provincial government based on the current state of business processes and services? (P2) So the best way will be to go back to PSG’s, define objectives and from there come with project or services and for each service of which will have a project mapped out business processes that are required. Not that business process for the department but end- to end business processes. So if it’s a service that says, deliver social grant to a child or mother, map the full process including all the departments that are involved in the provision of that service. Once you have that map then, people working in IT or ICT can come and say this is where we can help to automate that process more efficient. But, the nice thing that we would have is the full defined business processes where all different stakeholders know their required contribution in the process and required response level and required skills in the process. So if it does not work, you can always go back to the process and note that this does not work. So that would the best way of implement e-Government initiatives. So we will implement them once, business processes and services have been defined. E-Government will come by improving those services by automating using IT by increasing delivering platforms, through internet, mobile and through access channels.

So one of the easiest ways of implementing e-Government is to define and designed services based on strategic goals and using ICT’s to enable the delivery of that services.