The State Digital Infrastructure Company is more than just a mouthful of words. Since we love our abbreviations in tech they have conveniently shortened it for us to SDIC.
What is it you might ask? It is yet another state owned enterprise, in the planning stages, that is most probably bound to join the list of other failed state owned businesses. Think Eskom, think SAA, think anything with government as the main shareholder.
What is the SDIC?
As reported by BusinessTech, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (another mouthful) has published its draft national data and cloud policy, which proposes moving most of the government’s data online.
I can already see how the big corporates like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and even maybe Apple, are seeing the big contract at the end of the road to get onboard with this. To be frank, I would prefer if one of them get the contract to supply the service. I trust them more with privacy and security of data than a government who has been struggling for years to achieve their own Digital Terrestrial Television goals. Now they want to tackle a unified solution in the cloud.
Digital Government
Years ago I was sitting at an eGovernment conference hosted by ITWeb. As with most conferences the mornings are normally boring with keynote speakers who had their presentation build by someone smarter than them. The afternoons are where you really get the worker bees who present the most fascinating content and ideas.
At this particular conference there was a presentation by Adobe that showcased the possibilities that can be achieved by software they wrote that brought different sets of data together. If memory serves my right it could pull ID data and cross links it with drivers license data, tax data… basically it created a single view of who you are as a South African citizen.
The purpose of that presentation was not to create a Big Brother scenario, but to show how quick an easy it would be to gain access to the information needed on an individual in order to provide state provided services to them. It was to show how service delivery could be improved. Needless to say I have not seen any implementation of anything remotely and neither have I seen any improvements in speed of service from any government institution.
If you need a more recent example of how our government takes a broken system and fucks it up even more by applying digital angles to it, then try and get an appointment for your drivers license on the “e-booking portal”. They eliminated the long lines outside the Licensing Offices and replaced it with a bottleneck on a network.
State Digital Infrastructure Company Cloud
You look up at the sky and you dream about flying in the clouds. This is what this whole thing is in my humble opinion. Another dream by government to be efficient. Luckily for us all the Gupta’s will not be involved as they are being kept busy with the whole State Capture thing. But is there more Gupta’s out there who are going to provide this service at an inflated cost?
This is what I think will happen with the servers at the State Digital Infrastructure Company…
If you want to go and attempt a successful cloud environment that handles mass volumes of data across a national grid, then knock on the door of the banks and the big players in the financial space. Clearly they are doing something right. Digital has become their core strategy to engage with customers and they are doing a great job. Those are the people I would trust more with a project of this magnitude.
But, I would not get upset yet. As I said, they are still trying to succeed at DTT rollout. For now all they have is a really long name: The State Digital Infrastructure Company. Say that fast 5 times and have a beer afterwards.
