Statement by the Executive Mayor, Alderman
Patricia de Lille
City of Cape Town partners with IBM in prestigious
project to help optimise service delivery
The City of Cape Town and IBM have come to the end of an incredible
three-week journey.
This year, the City of Cape Town was honoured to receive an IBM Smarter
Cities Grant.
This meant that IBM would send a high-level team of executives from
their operations around the world to work on a business project of the
City’s choosing at no cost us.
Given the talented team we had to work with, we decided to focus on a
particular problem that had come up again and again in our strategic
planning: how to manage, maintain and rationalise our social assets.
Social assets include community facilities, clinics, development centres
and many other examples of installations that serve the community,
either by providing a programme or a service of some kind.
IBM spent a great deal of time interviewing our officials and politicians,
seeking to get to the heart of the issues and proposing ways forward.
In addition to this, they reviewed huge amounts of City information
sources, at both the operational and the strategic level.
Today, they officially presented their findings to us.
They have proposed a model of integrated, transversal planning that can
help us identify, profile and manage our social assets based on the needs
of each individual community.
At its heart, they have focused on a model of building our social service
delivery model around the individual resident in a ‘citizen-centric’ design.
This means that we have to ask ourselves: what does each social service
mean for the person who receives the service; how do they perceive it;
and what are their needs?
In order to do this, they have proposed a delivery framework within the
City – a unit focused on transversally addressing common issues related
to facilities across directorates.
This unit will rely on using project and programme methodology to bring
officials together to create shared solutions focused on innovation and
design-led thinking.
I am particularly satisfied with this approach.
First, it is consistent with our attempt to find creative design-based
solutions for a range of common challenges in the City – an approach
which is consistent with our designation as the World Design Capital for
2014.
Second, and more importantly, this approach builds on the work we have
already done in the City to institute transversal management through the
economic and social clusters, a point specifically referenced by IBM.
Not only does this mean we have been moving in the right direction of
creating integrated management in the City, it means that we now have
an opportunity to consolidate the gains we have already achieved and
take our transversal management approach to the next level.
I would like to thank the IBM team for all of their hard work and thank all
those City officials and politicians who have helped make this project a
success.