Digital Projects and the Role of Technology at the City of Cape Town

Omeshnee Naidoo is Director of Information Systems and Technology at City of Cape Town. She’s the CIO at the City. We explore digital projects at the City of Cape Town, technology’s role in improving service delivery and quality of life, the importance of real-time service delivery, tech investments, the collaboration between municipalities, private-public sector collaboration, and her vision of the city in 2040.

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Key Takeaways

Digital Projects at the City of Cape Town

• Resilience based projects due to shocks and stress that came into the city e.g. Drought related projects.
• The city has always been fairly digitally mature.
• Sustainable transportation projects, urban planning projects, and other city-related projects.
• Now embarking on a ‘’Digital Modernisation Programme’’ around how they look at current systems in the environment and modernising them into newer age technologies to ensure as a city they are digitally progressive.

Current trends and opportunities for City of Cape Town

• Omeshnee talks about remote working and a hybrid type of approach.

Technology’s role in improving service delivery and quality of life

• If technology can bring business value to the problems we face, then technology change can be useful.
• The city of Cape Town will start to see a future in terms of IoT, artificial intelligence, and better use of the great amounts of data available to the city to get better and more effective at decision making.

Importance of real-time service delivery

• E-services have been very useful and growing in demand.
• There is an increase in online and mobile payments.
• Omeshnee sees this trend continuing into the future.

Has Covid-19 stopped you from investing or are you investing more on technology?

• Revenue decline for the city is possible but hard to say what that can look like.
• Tech investment happing in spaces for cost optimasation and where there is a need for innovation.
• Cities should to look at opportunities for revenue generation outside the norm.

The case for collaboration between municipalities

• Big metro’s digital tech investment is quite similar.
• Smaller district municipalities can benefit from metros that have highly digitized environments.
• Governments must work together and see assets as a whole instead of operating in siloes.

Private-public sector collaboration

• Public-Private partnerships will become more and more important in time.
• Both parties need to understand there are value and benefits on both ends.
• The private sector must be willing to stick with it for the long haul.
• Expectations should be managed.

City of Cape Town’s biggest challenge to secure a bright future

• Resilience is key.
• Understand what the shocks can be.
• Scenario-based perspective on how to react to shocks.

Omenshee vision for City of Cape Town in 2040

• Best of breed technologies.
• More data and better decision-making.

About Omeshnee
Omeshnee Naidoo is the current CIO at the City of Cape Town. She has worked in the ICT industry for over 15 years and brings with her a wealth of public sector and FMCG industry-based experience.

In this digital transformational world, Omeshnee is a strong believer and advocate of being able to adapt to “new” ways of doing things on a daily basis. This can be seen from her own career of having consulted across the globe on various systems and strategy implementations and then moving on into local and regional CIO roles. She has extensive experience in leading large-scale ERP-based implementations through to driving strategy and implementations for digital transformation.

Omeshnee has a personal passion for people development, most especially in the female and small business entrepreneurship spaces.