None of the projects discussed here would be possible without a robust, well-run and up to date ICT infrastructure, with its vital hardware and software services which links the information backbone to the officials to efficiently perform their e-administration tasks. All the essential cables, servers and routers are the information backbone of any large organisation in the modern world.

The ICT infrastructure is dependent on the Wide Area Network (WAN) spread between George and Vredenburg and provides connectivity to 9 000 workstations in 108 buildings.

More than 11 000 officials continually use one or more of the 377 custom developed applications in conjunction with commercial software packages to perform their internal business tasks.

The demand from the departments for ICT services is confirmed by the 5 000 Help desk calls per month and 120 000 emails per day.

Project Foundation is an ambitious, forward-looking project to ensure that the Provincial Government of the Western Cape has the right infrastructure in place to enable it to take advantage not only of today’s technology, but also of new tools that are likely to emerge in the near future. The most important component is a fast, reliable network, and members of the tranversal cluster have been working for several years to improve the Province’s LAN environments, as well as the WAN service currently provided by the government IT agency SITA.