In Botswana, the term innovation has become like a chorus to many government officials or private sector executives in their budget speech, or nation address or annual report presentation. However I have observed that in practice, our IT departments at government and the private sector are doing little or nothing to use information technology to improve productivity, service quality, cost control, risk management and maximize return on investment on their IT infrastructure. No company can grow or go far without a robust IT strategy aligned to business goals. No government can achieve improved quality of life of her people without good technology and innovation in place.
I have observed that there is a high IT service demand in Botswana however, the IT service performance is very poor. A good example is the government data network, which delivers mediocre service in many instances. Their systems are often down especially the revenue and the new GABS (Government Accounting and Budgeting System). I have personally waited for over two months to receive a payment, because the GABS system was reported to be down most of the time.
The main problem or challenge in Botswana is Wide Area Network (WAN) and Application service delivery. If for example you want to download a form from the Ministry of Trade and Industry website to register a company, you will be lucky to manage to download and print the form. It takes more than 10 minutes to buy the Government Gazette because the system is very slow. This is true with most government and parastatals IT systems, especially revenue systems, which normally involve serious authentication processes. I am not attacking any ministry or company here; I am just using them as examples. Standard Chartered Bank Botswana is also often affected by a high system downtime and it is likely that it is because of their WAN Service by BTC. So the government WAN, as well as WAN networks for the private sector, including banks and parastatals are not optimized to deliver optimum quality of service. This is proven by a high system downtime Batswana customers often experience. BTC is a monopoly in providing WAN services. However the problem does not lie only with BTC, companies and government need good network design if they are need increased performance of their networks and maximize use of their bandwidth.
How can we improve IT service performance in Botswana? The answer to all these problems is WAN and Application Optimization. WAN optimization is an architecture solution designed to integrate many technologies and products, apply multiple techniques to improve application performance and delivery, as defined by Cisco Systems Inc, the world’s number one networking company, based in San Jose, California.
The main challenge with IT is that it is dynamic. New services and applications are constantly added to the network infrastructure. People are becoming more mobile and everybody now wants to do literally anything using IT, be it sending money, buying airtime, paying bills or connecting to their corporate network and working from home or even abroad using their mobile phones, laptops, tablets and smart phones. WAN Optimization is key to improved IT service performance.
In Botswana there is a serious skill shortage in areas of application development and WAN support. However UB has introduced a Cisco learning academy, which can offer Cisco training that can help a lot in understanding WAN technologies. Botswana’s private sector is also not vibrant and lack skills to offer good WAN network solutions. That’s why most tenders are often outsourced to foreign companies. Most of the companies listed on the PPADB website claiming to be 100% citizen owned ICT companies are actually retailers or suppliers of ICT accessories, rather than being real IT companies. They are no different to Game Discount store or incredible connections or VIVA, who are just selling computers and accessories. I encourage the government and the private sector to invest in training their workforce on WAN and application development. The Department of Information Technology, which manages and support the government WAN, has recently advertised a tender for supply and install Cisco equipment and I believe they will come up with a solution to address the public IT service performance issues.
