[kictanet] The Size of this Elephant (from my blog)

[Paul Kukubo]

Alex

Thanks for your response. It was interesting. And indeed, I may have
changed the metaphor from Elephant to Bull, but I'm assured it is well
understood.

An important clarification for worth communicating here. IT projects are
rarely just about the technical software, hardware piece. Most substantial
public sector, and indeed most IT projects in general are rarely just about
buying a software or hardware. They are about transforming a business
process to work more efficiently to achieve a service or business outcome.
This therefore requires skill sets in business analysis, business process
transformation, change management and project management. The role of the
head of IT, commonly referred to as the chief information officer or CIO is
to develop the enterprise architecture. Meaning how the how organizations
information flow is structured to support the business. How accounting
systems will work with sales systems for example. How the sales system will
support multiple locations, how stock management can be optimized so that
there is less holding of expansive stocks. The  core IT piece Is crucial
but comes only when that the puzzle is understood.

This is the world in which large scale consulting firms live and this is
the value that their clients seek. This is where the large IT contracts
swim around globally. In fact most outsourcing is done to farm out the
basic IT parts to companies that can understand this while leaving the main
organization to focus on value addition.

Our discussions with the local IT players have included sensitization of IT
service providers to the wider opportunity. Many already play in this
space. some of the techies may well be service providers to these larger
organizations as part of the value chain of service provision. Ocassionaly
the task may boil down to a simple IT talk that can be sourced directly to
a techie. This is rare and would not usually be a high value transaction.
The rule of thumb is the more strategic it is, the higher its shilling
value. Sometimes just designing a change and process program is worth much
more than the actual IT deployment.

As for the #140Friday debate, if you care to share what you heard, I'd be
happy to understand what the conspiracy was about. It would not change the
substantive arguments in any way.

These discussion are important and thanks for keeping them alive.

Asante

Paul Kukubo CEO
Kenya ICT Board.

On Monday, April 30, 2012, Alex Gakuru wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Firstly, I confess opposition to your phrase "The elephant is big and fat
> and has to be eaten a piece at a time.."
> to avoid encouraging rampant "elephants eating" wiping out the jumbo and
> killing tourism forex earnings. "Turkwel" is a baby elephant my ICANN NCSG
> colleagues adopted after visiting a Nairobi animal orphage during 2010
> ICANN meeting held at Nairobi. But I trust that your message solely and
> innocently intended to illustrate the size of Kshs 1.2 trillion current
> government budget as cake big enough for everyone to have a slice of it.
> appreciated!
>
> - - - - <snip>- - - -
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Alex Gakuru <gakuru at gmail.com <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'gakuru at gmail.com');>>
> Date: Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 12:29 PM
> Subject: Re: Offtopic: Fwd: Thank you for renewing your fostering of
> Turkwel.
> To: William Drake <william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch <javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch');>>
> Cc: NCSG-NCUC-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'NCSG-NCUC-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu');>
>
>
> I have just written an email to the Kenya Wildlife Service (
> http://www.kws.org/) requesting them to declare the individual a *persona
> non grata* in all of our wildlife parks.
> regards,
>
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru at gmail.com<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'gakuru at gmail.com');>
> > wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:23 AM, William Drake <
>> william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
>> 'william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch');>>
>>
>> Bob Parsons, chief executive of the market-leading domain name registrar
>>> Go Daddy, has come to blows with animal-rights organisation PETA (People
>>> for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), after he shot an African elephant
>>> and posted the video online.
>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/bob_parsons_gets_peta_gong_for_killing_elephant/
>>>
>>
>> Despicable! Posturing as "a kind white man" on a safari (in Zimbabwe!),
>> accompanies by a camera crew out to save Africans from starvation since
>> their maize crops are being ruined by elephants. An in the process feed
>> them with tasty elephant meat - incidentally which he reports was not
>> enough for all "the villagers." Would his plan on eradicating African
>> hunger then not mean killing all the elephants for meat? Did he eat the
>> meat he so proudly hunted?
>>
>> Or maybe lately there just wasn't "enough" savagely entertaining African
>> content at GoDaddy, therefore he decided to spur it up ostensibly "while on
>> holiday in Africa"?
>>
>> While at it, what has the multi-millionaire done to save his
>> countless starving Americans  , starting at his own neighbourhood?
>>
>> This video's message is deliberately meant to covey a message even bigger
>> than the Jumbo this savagely act achieved.
>>
>> upset,
>>
>> Alex
>>
> - - - - <snap>- - - -
>
> Be that as it may,
>
> There are two sides to the local participation story: -
>
>  a) the advocates genuinely desirous to have their fair share of the
> taxes revenue cake for (ICT) products services rendered to the GoK
>
>  b) Corruption agents schemes plotting to perpetrate fraudulent
> acquisition of public taxes revenues
>
>  The first is a legitimate cause while the second is evil that must never
> be entertained, regardless of whether the Kenyan resides here or is in the
> Diaspora.
>
>  Core problems include the lack of good faith in the procurement system.
> Business persons and individuals pop up claiming “local” while actually
> fronting foreign firms interests adding to government's problems.
> Procurement officers collude with suppliers to favour some over others,
> contrary to (Section 34 of the) Public Procurement and Disposal Act, 2005.
> You may recall when 3,000 were all sacked? “Minimalist” tender information
> publishing. Unrelated obstacles to erected to block local participation.
>
>  We can achieve (a) the good local ICT stakeholders cause and eradicate
> (b) corruption cancer by: -
>
>  1) Transparently publishing ALL government ICT systems requirements at a
> designated website and calling upon systems/services providers to
> demonstrate small-scale but working prototypes. Contract proactive
> http://www.gov.mu/portal/sites/eprocurement/ilsv.jsp with our reactive
> “post event” reportage http://www.ppoa.go.ke/ (publishing standard
> documents, reports and reviews)
>
>  2) Using ISO 12207-2008 Standard break down the systems into modules and
> may tender them separately, after all, the Internet “network of networks”
> success proves that no system alone is ever complete.
>
>  3) Remove weird requirements for locals to participate on such tenders,
> such as, “demonstrate 5 years experience developing similar systems..”
> “audited accounts for X years” etc. How would a recent sharp Computer
> Science graduate with only a laptop and working ever participate?
>
> 4) Separately tendered modules spread capacity/capability risks and spurs
> competitive achievement record for local services providers shielding
> government from historical projects implementation failures.
>
>  5) Kenya needs a very firm and clear Public-Private Partnership legal
> framework that governs every such project. Recall my recent ke-users post,
> “...Had the good fortune to learn "how" Scalpel legislation governing PPP
> See: http://www.icrc.gov.ng/?cat=36 Hats off to the good work by ICRC!
> [Save the website www.icrc.gov.ng]”
>
>  6) Need to avoid "affirmative action" abuses witnessed in certain
> countries where powerful politicians' children (and their outfits) are
> awarded hefty government contracts indirect briberies fronted as promoting
> local firms. Cognisant that those qualified ought not be punished simply
> because their parent is a politician. (The last time I checked did not find
> engaging in politics classified as criminal:-)
>
> In short, we have to avoid trying to address a procurement system and
> processes problem through activities and/or events.
>
>  my two cents contribution to the discussion.
>
>  Regards,
>
>  Alex
>
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> This is heavy stuff. I'll try to respond tomorrow, if I can.
>
> Alex
>
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Paul Kukubo <pkukubo at ict.go.ke> wrote:
>
> Listers
>
> I thought id share from my latest blog post (www.paulkukubo.co.ke). I
> have pasted the entire piece here.
>
> The size of this Elephant.
>
> The recent #140friday twitter and off twitter debate was centred around a
> simple and important theme. If the Kenya Government procurement ecosystem
> developed a preferential orientation towards local firms, the result would
> be that we would develop greater capability. It was argued by some that the
> government seemed to indicate an inclination towards foreign big name
> firms. Whereas the facts don’t necessarily support the claim, I doubt
> anyone would argue with the basic premise of the argument. Local businesses
> should benefit from tax based projects.
>
> I offer some discussion points that may guide the continuing discussion.
>
> How do we turn preferential advantage into true national capacity? The
> recent procurement of seats from the Prisons department for the national
> assembly is a welcome effort by any measure. Without the benefit of detail,
> one hopes that the process has created capacity for the Prisons department
> to be competitive in furniture making regionally and even become a net
> exporter. One hopes they have worked with some of the best furniture
> designers locally and created synergies that can be replicated. One hopes
> that the low cost of prison labour has also been value added by developing
> prisoners who can become great furniture makers once they leave. Use of
> materials is important. Have we used woods plastics, composites that wee
> sourced from locally sustainable sources. Parliaments are important
> national symbols in so many ways. They must represent the best of our
> national collective aspiration. How they look and feel is important to our
> national psyche. We can draw parrellels here for ICT.
> 2. Sometimes,even the government does not necessarily know what it does
> not know and is often seeking to know what it should know first, before
> seeking answers. The whole area of drilling down from service objectives to
> architecting an ICT solution can be daunting. For example, we need to have
> a simple, easy to use lands information management system so that Kenyans
> can search for land titles. One issue that may arise here is that only 30%
> of Kenyan land mass has been adjudicated, and surveyed and provided with
> title. Your ancestral land may not be under title yet. So how is a lands
> system relaxant just yet for you, some may argue. Another issue might be
> that the lands ministry collectes substantial revenue in fees and rates
> that has to be remitted to the treasury every year. The same department
> then has to go back to treasury to seek finance for a new system to support
> its operations. Treasury has myriads of pressing priorities. The Kenya ICT
> Board proposes a system that allows a private sector partner to provide a
> system and recover its revenue from the collected fees. The issue becomes
> one of structuring the deal so that the best in class partner can be found
> and government is guaranteed of improved revenue whilst having a system
> that can carry us to the next generation. Many systems in government can be
> delivered like this. The task and the system goes beyond the technology
> implementati
>
>

-- 
Paul Kukubo
Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board
PO Box 27150 - 00100
Nairobi, Kenya

12th Floor, Teleposta Towers Koinange Street

Tel +254 20 2089061, +254 20 2211960
Fax: +254 20 2211962
website: www.ict.go.ke
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personal contacts
_______________

Cell: + 254 717 180001


skype: kukubopaul
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____________________
Vision: Kenya becomes a top ten global ICT hub

Mission: To champion and actively enable Kenya to adopt and exploit ICT,
through promotion of partnerships, investments and infrastructure growth
for socio economic enrichment
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