Many scholars lament of poor infrastructure to manage and preserve digital records
within the public sector in South Africa to support electronic government (egovernment).
For example, in South Africa, the national archives’ repository and its
subsidiary provincial archives do not have infrastructure to ingest digital records into
archival custody. As a result, digital records are left to the creating agencies to manage
and preserve. The problem is compounded by the fact that very few public sector
organisations in South Africa have procured systems to manage digital records.
Therefore, a question is how are digital records managed and stored in these
organisations to support e-government? Do public organisations entrust their records to
the cloud as an alternative storage given the fact that both physical and virtual storages
are a problem? If they do, how do they ensure accessibility, governance, security and
long-term preservation of records in the cloud? Utilising the Digital Curation Centre
(DCC) Lifecycle Model as a guiding framework, this qualitative study sought to
explore digital curation of records in the cloud to support e-government services in
South Africa with the view to propose a framework that would guide the public sector
to migrate records to the cloud storage. Semi-structured interviews were employed to
collect data from the purposively selected Chief Information Officers in the national
government departments that have implemented some of the electronic services such
as the Department of Arts and Culture, Department of Home Affairs, Department of
Higher Education and Training and the Department of Basic Education.
Furthermore, the National Archives and Records Services of South Africa was also
chosen as it is charged with the statutory regulatory role of records management in
governmental bodies. So is the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), a public
sector ICT company established in 1999 to consolidate and coordinate the state’s
information technology resources in order to achieve cost savings through scale,
increase delivery capabilities and enhance interoperability. Interview data were
augmented through document analysis of legislation and policies pertaining to data
storage. Data were analysed thematically and interpreted in accordance with the
objectives of the study. The key finding suggests that although public servants
informally and unconsciously put some records in the clouds, government departments in South Africa are sceptical to entrust their records to the cloud due to a number of
reasons, such as lack of policy and legislative framework, lack of trust to the cloud
storage, jurisdiction, legal implications, privacy, ownership and security risks. This
study recommends that given the evolution of technology, the government should
regulate cloud storage through policy and legislative promulgation, as well as
developing a government-owned cloud managed through SITA in order for all
government departments to use it. This study suggests a framework to migrate paperbased
records to cloud storage that is controlled by the government. / Information Science / D.Lit. et Phil. (Information Science)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/26981 |
| Date | 05 January 2021 |
| Creators | Shibambu, Badimuni Amos |
| Contributors | Ngoepe, Mpho Solomon |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xiv, 191 leaves) : illustrations (some color), application/pdf |
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