M. Tech. Business Information Systems

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / If one compares governments to the corporate world across the globe, it often plays second fiddle when it comes to strategy; new ideas, adopting of new management styles & processes and lastly, change, for this reason, the Provincial Government of the Western Cape recently undertook a journey that would shed it from these stereotypical behaviours. The journey was Christened „The Modernisation Programme‟ and was launched in 2009; one of its brainchildren named „Project Management Approach‟ was created as the bastion against inefficiencies and ineffective service delivery. A case in point is the unfinished Eastern Boulevard freeway in the city centre of Cape Town; the project was scrapped in the seventies, as the need for it was not justified by the traffic demand at the time in relation to its astronomical cost - a clear indication of poor project planning and management. This study was therefore undertook to examine whether the Project Management Approach (PMA) as part of the holistic Modernisation Programme was successfully implemented and if it yielded the expected results and attitude change in the project management environment in the Department of Transport and Public Works, which is responsible for more than half of all Provincial Government‟s projects. The study examines the impact the Project Management Approach had on service delivery, project management IT infrastructure and as a strategic tool. The analysis showed that although the PMA was welcomed by top management and even has the Director General (DG) as its business champion. However, it fell by the way side two to three years later, this was mostly due to limited communication, which practically ceased two years later and a steering committee that was never fully established and supported by senior official. An outcome, which resulted in roughly half of the project leaders being partially aware of the PMA, a similar analysis also revealed that they were not even aware of it being a long-term strategy. The analysis based on stakeholder involvement was more positive and many of the client department‟s end users were satisfied with the degree of improved cooperation between departmental teams. Further analysis conducted on the client/end user‟s opinion resulted in positive responses but failed to fire up the researcher‟s enthusiasm, as it was hardly the response one would expect from clients, had international standards and best practices been present. “Project management can be defined as a way of developing structure in a complex project, where the independent variables of time, cost, resources and human behaviour come together.” (Rory Burke) “Operations keeps the lights on, strategy provides a light at the end of the tunnel, but project management is the train engine that moves the organization forward.” (Joy Gumz)

Public sector decision makers are confronted by pressures to make faster and better decisions as a result of the competitive environment they operate in. However, there is a trend in the public sector, including the Department of Transport (DoT) in South Africa, to invest in management information systems (MIS) that are highly fragmented and not aiding effective and timely decision-making. As a result, the country witnessed several service delivery protests since 2008 which also affected the public transport sector, such as the widespread burning of Metrorail trains several times by angry commuters. In most instances, poor service delivery emanates from the fact that public servants do not have information at their fingertips to make decisions. This quantitative study utilised Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies 5 (COBIT 5) as a theoretical framework to investigate the integration of MIS at the DoT with a view to enhancing business intelligence for effective decision-making. Data were collected through a questionnaire directed at middle managers and senior managers that were selected through stratification of business units at the DoT, as well as analysis of documents such as system specifications and strategic plans. The study established that the DoT has several systems such as Alfresco, BAS, GIS, Logis and Persal to name a few, which serve different purposes. However, in most instances, the systems are not integrated as the current infrastructure did not support integration needs and plans to accommodate changing requirements. This is compounded by the system policy implementation constraints, as well as ageing legacy systems that are obsolete. The only component where MIS was found to be integrated, was in the financial business units (Supply Chain Management, Finance and Budgeting). Core business units use off-the-shelf systems and, in some cases, custom-made applications that do not integrate with any other system and thus hinder decision-making. In conclusion, decisions are made based on thumb-sucking, as management does not have access to comprehensive information that is stored in fragmented unintegrated systems. The study recommends that governance structures should be set up to deal with a more holistic business, information and technology architecture for the DoT that enable integration of various systems for effective decision-making. Failure to transform this pattern would lead to service delivery protests persisting. A further study on a framework to integrate MIS in the public sector is recommended. / Information Science / M. Inf.