Top ICT tenders: Comms dept to step up performance management

South Africans are awaiting the outcome of finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s reworked budget speech tomorrow with some trepidation, but several provincial departments are opting to go ahead with the advertisement of technology requirements for the new financial year starting on 1 April.

Two national government departments also feature in this week’s top tenders on National Treasury’s eTender Portal, including a specialised request from the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) for an organisational performance management software system.

In its tender documentation, the department refers to National Treasury’s 2010 issuing of a framework for strategic and annual performance plans to guide institutional short- and medium-term planning. A revised framework was then introduced to reaffirm the planning logic and institutionalise planning to enable better service delivery.

“The planning principles to be implemented through the revised framework aim to focus the planning approach towards achieving results; standardise the concepts used in short- and medium-term planning instruments; streamline the planning, monitoring and evaluation processes; and increase learning and innovation through improved use of evidence and findings from monitoring and evaluation,” it says.

This resulted in the DCDT procuring the services of a provider in 2011 to assist in developing a performance management system. Supported by an integrated performance management policy, this system was ready for organisation-wide implementation during the 2012/13 financial year.

Now the department says it wishes to secure a service provider that can provide an organisational performance management software system to support its 2025 to 2030 strategic plan, help drive a high-performance culture and ensure the outcomes of the 2025/26 annual performance and operational plans are efficiently and effectively delivered through monitoring and reporting on SMART KPAs and KPIs across all levels of the organisation.

While the department does not specifically say whether it prefers an off-the-shelf or bespoke system, under mandatory requirements it mentions that the successful service provider must agree to “develop the system which will be government data, be securely managed, hosted under government security compliance as per the DCDT IT security standards”.

It also notes under intellectual property rights that “ownership of the system should be the property of the DCDT” and must have components of migrating to other platforms.

Other tenders that make this week’s top 10:

• The City of Cape Town is calling for the supply, installation and maintenance of telecommunication GIS and network monitoring systems. The municipality points out it has a sizeable, multi-technology, multi-vendor network infrastructure and, accordingly, requires a holistic set of operations support systems and business support systems that bring together network performance monitoring, modern network monitoring, fault and event management, root cause analysis, non-SNMP device management, network traffic monitoring, service management integration, configuration management, specialised network planning and network inventory management systems.

• Mpumalanga’s Department of Agriculture, Rural Development and Land Administration requires development, implementation and support of an online decision support system. The aim of the project is to modernise the department’s manual processes by seamlessly integrating e-commerce, smart technology and a robust digital marketing tool to propel the province’s agriculture industry into a new era of growth, sustainability and success.

• KwaZulu-Natal’s Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs wishes to appoint a qualified and accredited Sage business partner to provide licensing, system support and related services for the Sage Evolution Financial System. The department acquired the system for use within its traditional finance division and at the district offices for financial assistance to traditional councils. The current licence was renewed through Sage and it is due to expire on 28 February 2026.

• The Eastern Cape Department of Public Works and Infrastructure invites bids for the implementation of a cyber security, intrusion prevention and vulnerability management solution. The system will service an organisation with 1 500 employees, as well as critical network devices in the environment. The solution must include a robust firewall component, threat and vulnerability scanning tools and ongoing support and maintenance services.

• Staying in the Eastern Cape, the province’s Department of Social Development is looking for a service provider to replace out of warranty and unsupported disaster recovery and backup SAN storage. The department has four data centres, and the servers are connected using fibre cables on brocade switches.

• The Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries seeks a professional service provider to provide a comprehensive spatial land use/geographic information system (GIS), inventory and modelling database solution on a software-as-a-service basis for the management of commercial forestry plantations. The department notes that computerised support systems, linked to a database, have become the main source of information for all plantation decision-making, activity planning and reporting. Forestry planning experts use and interpret comprehensive databases, growth models and computer systems for making decisions regarding the management of forest resources.

• The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission is looking for experienced resources to assist it in implementing a data lakehouse solution using Azure and Databricks. The service provider will supply resources remotely or on-site, as determined by the project requirements. Resources will not be engaged full-time for the entire contract duration, but will be utilised based on specific project needs.

• The Road Accident Fund is calling for information on a post-implementation review of its Project Bokamoso integrated claims management system. The review should encompass, among others, system usability and functionality; data migration and governance; backup processes; contract management and business value realisation.

• Eskom is conducting a standalone information gathering and market-testing exercise to inform and assist its further deliberation and development of a strategy for the Eskom Academy of Learning (EAL) smart village. it envisions that EAL will be transformed into a smart campus, serving as a demonstration and development centre for the integration of cutting-edge digital technology to increase the reliability, security, efficiency and introduction of new products to customers.The request for information focuses on three main streams: smart campus, training centres (legacy, renewable and smart grid labs) and IT/telecoms.