Bongani Mabaso's plan to fix the State IT Agency

The State IT Agency (Sita), government’s central IT procurement and services agency, has been through the wringer. The entity, created in 1999, has been plagued for much of its existence by oftentimes poor leadership and well as widespread corruption – detailed in a 2017 TechCentral interview former CEO Setumo Mohapi. Now, after several years without a CEO – the company had been placed into a form of administration by former communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams – Bongani Mabaso has taken the reins. Mabaso, previously a senior IT executive at Standard Bank Group, is promising to shake things up at Sita - by fixing what’s broken and focusing on service delivery to its government clients. Mabaso, who has a PhD in machine ethics and computational morality from the University of Pretoria and a BSc in engineering from the University of Cape Town, tells Duncan McLeod in this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS) about his plan to turn around the troubled entity. In the interview, Mabaso speaks about: • The direction he intends to take Sita in and why; • How artificial intelligence could be used in Sita’s procurement processes – and how it could help stamp out corruption in tenders; • His strategic plan, and how he will measure its success; • The IT skills shortage in the public sector and why it's at crisis levels; • The announcement by communications minister Mondli Gungubele that Sita will build a R6-billion broadband network – much of this work is already, in fact, happening; and • The impact of load shedding on public sector IT systems.