The promotional exercises have involved training of government officials given that government services provide substantial business to service providers and equipment vendors. Kenya, for example, intends to digitize the manual records at the ministries and provide online services, which will reduce the cost to many people.
Orange Business Services organized the first workshop for government officials in Mombasa last month in conjunction with Cisco, Oracle, HP East Africa, Microsoft, Intel, Deloitte, Dimension Data and Google. A second training event was organized by AccessKenya last week and representatives from Cisco, Oracle, NetApp, the ministry of information and communication and the Kenya ICT Board made presentations.
The workshops were a forum for the companies to introduce government officials to the services they are offering and some of the success stories in Africa and abroad. The workshops also provided a platform for the government and the private sector to deliberate on key priority areas and identify areas for partnership in public service delivery.
Companies made presentations on shared services, managed services, cloud computing, project management, use of mobile broadband for last mile solutions, WiMax technology, green IT and how it can be achieved in Kenya as well as availability of local technical support.
"There are some services that the government can offer and there are others which can be offered by the private sector; it is important to demarcate such areas before the online services boom once the fiber projects are complete," said Paul Kukubo, CEO, Kenya ICT Board.
"It is important for government officials to understand the products available in the market and how they can improve service delivery," said Jonathan Somen, MD, AccessKenya Group.
There are 42 government ministry Web sites that can be moved to a shared infrastructure to make it easier to manage the content, distribute and manage the records, said Somen.
One crucial presentation was on the role of Project Management Office in delivering projects. The presentation, made by Elijah Kibogo of Deloitte, was important given the systematic failure of government projects because of lack of proper management.
The presentation emphasized the role of PMO in ensuring clarity and managed reporting systems and the example used was the Deloitte Enterprise Management framework. Kibogo also addressed critical success factors and short comings of PMO.
Recognizing the importance of PMO in ICT, the Kenya ICT board said it would lead in training business people and advocating implementation of PMO methodology in all technology projects in Kenya.