IT companies eye tenders as counties plan to spend Sh186bn

Kenyan and multinational firms are eyeing a piece of IT tenders from national and county governments with the expected 150 per cent increase in spending to Sh186 billion in the next three years.

Last week, more than 300 public and private and public sector members met in Mombasa for the sixth edition of the Connected Kenya Summit where the government re-launched its National ICT Master Plan.

The master plan outlined the key ICT projects the government intends to roll-out in the next three years which includes national digital registry services, a citizen service portal and government-shared services.

These projects and automation of county governments services such as use of Enterprise Resource Planning solutions (ERPs) have attracted firms such as SAP, Dimension Data, Oracle and infrastructure providers including Jamii Telecoms and Liquid Telecoms.

Others are Microsoft, IBM and Huawei that are positioning themselves to secure tenders to supply hardware and software.

Fred Matiang’i, the ICT secretary said the projects are part of the key programmes identified in the presidential digital transformation of government which aims at getting 50 per cent of the country’s population to access e-government services by the year 2017.

“The government has already demonstrated its commitment by increasing the ICT budget allocation to 2.5 per cent and will continue to put aside more in the coming years to at least five per cent until we are at par with international best practices,” Dr Matiang’i said during the Connected Kenya Summit that ended last Thursday.

In 2011, the ICT spending stood at Sh74.4 billion accounting only for 0.3 per cent of its total budget with the lion’s share being spent on hardware at 65 per cent, followed by staff which took 18 per cent of the budget.

“A lot of digital data is now available to governments as societies become more hyper-connected and automated. With good analytics tools this data provides a good source of knowledge that should inform government in development planning and service delivery,” Andrew Waititu, the managing director, SAP-East Africa said.

“Through innovative technologies, SAP Africa is committed to enabling both central government and the counties to prosper and improve the lives of all citizens,” he said.

The county governments last month also got a boost from the World Bank after it approved a Sh2.5 billion loan to the government to finance ICT programmes in the 47 counties.

The cash will be used to strengthen internal processes using ICT and improve service delivery. The project will be managed by the ICT Authority.

The new programme will enable the national government to work closely with counties to improve services through ICT reforms and enhance transparency and good governance in the management of county affairs.

It will help the counties to develop road maps for development and deployment of ICT.

In Nairobi county, the funds will help roll out the integrated county management tool to enhance accountability in revenue management.

Dimension Data is targeting the counties with its IT security solutions, data centre, and managed infrastructure, cloud computing offerings where it offers either public or privately hosted services. It also offers e-mail services on the cloud platform.

“With our cloud platform counties, will not need to buy serves as they will be able to hive a piece on our platform saving them on costs. They will also be able to focus on their core work that is services delivery to the citizen by outsourcing most of their non core functions such as the IT security,” said Benson Karanja, lead public sector, Dimension Data.

The National ICT Master plan launched last week identified some key weaknesses that is slowing the adoption of IT services by the government and which it noted can be addressed through public private partnerships among them is in human personnel.

Tailor products

“Capacity is lacking for the information systems professionals required to operate the information systems and networks to be deployed. This is in the area of ERP deployment, network engineering and administration, data centre support engineers and cyber security administrators,’’ read part of the ICT master plan.

Dimension Data notes that this can be overcome by the public sector outsourcing its IT services to firms that have scale and depth in terms of human capacity required is required to the fast changing technology world.

Joshua Chepkwony, the chairman Jamii Telecoms said the National ICT Master plan has provided an opportunity to private sector to know what projects that government wants to prioritise on in the next three years and as such tailor some of their projects to meet the demand in order to secure the contracts.