May 6, 2013
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Parliament’s ICT striving towards excellence.
Parliament’s ICT striving towards excellence.
Work
In May 2013, Parliament of South Africa passed Round 1 of the iCMG Enterprise Architecture Excellence Awards in three categories.
Parliament of South Africa used an enterprise architecture approach in developing its 2009-2014 ICT strategy. Enterprise architecture is the means through which an enterprise plans and implements its Information and Communication Technology strategy by ensuring that business needs are addressed. Parliament use enterprise architecture to focus on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the institution. The enterprise architecture approach followed was entered into the international competition, which draws submissions from organisations across the world.
The entry of Parliament was submitted in three categories:
- Transformation and planning
- Best Enterprise & IT architecture in Govt / Defence /Public Sector
- Enterprise architecture
The winners are selected through a three round process. In the first round the submission is reviewed by a core committee of independent experts that evaluated the quality of the submissions and adherence to quality criteria. In the second round the submissions will be reviewed independently by jury members. Their scores will determine the finalists in each category. The final round of judging will be done by all the jury members, collectively. Their combined scores will determine the Winners in Each category. Through each round of competition, the judges are assigned to assess submissions in the area of their individual interest and expertise so that it is evaluated by people that understand the type of architecture work and its context.
The results of second round will be made available on 17 May 2013, the finalist on 3 June 2013 and the winners will be announced on 25 July 2013.
In terms of the categories Parliament entered the following are the number of entries that passed the first round:
- Transformation and planning – 16 entries
- Best Enterprise & IT architecture in Govt / Defense /Public Sector -15 entries
- Enterprise architecture – 23 entries
Having passed through the 1st round is testimony of the quality of work done at Parliament. Passing the first round can be equated to an athlete being chosen to represent its country at the Olympic Games. The election into the 2nd round of evaluation shows that the Parliament of South Africa’s implementation of Enterprise architecture principles is comparable with the best deployments of Enterprise architecture in the world.
Irrespective of whether Parliament of South Africa moves through to the list of finalist or ultimately the winners, having passed through first round is a huge achievement.
For more information see: http://www.icmgworld.com/corp/ArchitectureAwards/2013/architecture_nominations.asp
Comments (3)
Congratulations on this notable achievement.
ICMG sounds like an interesting group – but I am surprised to see, on a fast check of their website – that they don’t identify themselves or say anything about their track record.Why is the SA government participating in this contest? I can see how an evaluation of existing IT would be to your benifit – are these people experts in this area? Who says so?I’m sorry if I sound negative – I guess it’s because I remember my first serious encounter with accountants – who apparently believed that if you had everything entered right in your books, you had solved the problem of paying the bills. I have a very good friend who made a fortune as an industrial engineer (He just gave $5 million to his college) and he well knew the difficulty of applying analysis to actual effective outcome.
@tychecat - The group is specialists in the topic of Enterprise Architecture and is home to several well known people in the industry. I had been part of their forums for some time. We have not made use of their consulting services and I can not testify to the quality of it. I know however that they had been involved in Enterprise Architecture for some time and has developed some good White papers. I have attended some of their training seminars that was of high quality as well. Thanks for commenting and questioning their credentials. I think the work we have done in the SA Parliament is exceptional and worthy of entering into the contest. There is not much to be gained except recognition from a panel of experts.
Thanks for the info Jurgens. It sounds to me like our congress could take some training on information tech skills from your parliament- even on skills of basic communication – as they seem to be somewhat deficient in this area (among others).
Imagine, if you can, living in the most powerful country in the world and seeing it run be a bunch of self-seeking clowns. One state is actually considering legislation requiring teachers to carry guns – another trying to institute a state religion, and, as the world knows, our national Congress is pretty much deadlocked – and a danger to the rest of the world whenever they encourage another hair-brained scheme.