Home Affairs fails to fill critical IT posts

Governance and innovation – mind the gaps

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: It’s widely accepted that embracing IT service management (ITSM) good practice frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) enables organisations to standardise their service management processes and use a common language when talking both internally and with IT service providers and technology vendors. ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks, and procedures that IT organisations can tailor to their own needs. This improves [...]

MTN pilots LTE in Cape Town

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: Mobile operator, MTN, today announced that it will pilot its Long Term Evolution technology (LTE) in Cape Town. Speaking at the 2011 AfricaCom conference, Kanagaratnam Lambotharan, MTN SA Chief Technology Officer said positive feedback from stakeholders since the Gauteng pilot kicked off in July this year had informed the decision to pilot the technology in MTN. “It is the first time that the Mother City has been connected to this new generation network that MTN is piloting [...]

Absa focuses on innovation

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: Absa says it will continue to invest substantial human capital and finances into retail banking technology and innovation. “In line with customer expectations, we are committed to innovating on an on-going basis. This is significant as the ways of payments have evolved and continue to evolve,” says Arrie Rautenbach, head of Retail Markets at Absa. Looking at possible future trends in payments, Rautenbach projects that, unsurprisingly, the mobile phones will become the key device [...]

Vodacom promotion slashes data prices

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: Vodacom has announced a promotion which will see data costs for prepaid and Top Up customers reduced by 87%. According to the mobile operator, this promotion introduces Vodacom’s lowest per megabyte prepaid mobile data price of 2.4c. The data promotion launches on 7 November 2011 and will continue until 9 January 2012. The price reduction will apply to Broadband Advanced MyGig 20 prepaid and Top Up once-off data bundles, now priced at R499. The [...]

FNB releases new Blackberry app

FNB today announced that they have launched their BlackBerry banking Application, which works on the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 and features messaging/SMS on all BlackBerry devices.

Previous versions of the FNB BlackBerry App did not include SMS functionality.

“The addition of SMS to the BlackBerry devices is important to FNB’s strategy of allowing free communications between FNB customers. The customer is able to use the FNB App as part of their BlackBerry Internet

Subscription or BIS and therefore does not have to pay for data charges,” says Farren Roper, head of products and markets at FNB Connect.

Cell C, Google in local tech incubator

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: Mobile operator, Cell C, says it has joined forces with Google’s innovation program called Umbono and The Hub in Cape Town to support local technology entrepreneurial development. The company says with small and medium businesses being one of the largest drivers of employment and economic development in the country, government is encouraging larger businesses to look at building up and supporting smaller companies. The Umbono program is a 6-month incubation project for technology entrepreneurs [...]

Open innovation a top priority for SMEs

Innovation has been internationally quoted as one of the key drivers in business success for companies suffering the delayed effect of the global financial crisis, says IQ Business.

Willie Krause from IQ Business, says that innovation is especially relevant for small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa.

“Given that approximately 80 percent of the formal business sector in South Africa can be classified as SMEs or micro enterprises, it’s critical to the economic health of our country to identify processes such as open innovation to support these operations,” he says.

Contact centres in the cloud

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: It’s tough to page through a technology publication today without seeing some mention of “cloud computing.” And it’s no wonder why. Cloud computing is providing scalable, cost-effective resources as a service over the Internet. In this tight economy, that’s a huge value proposition. Today, there exists a wealth of hosted UC solutions for contact centres. What’s interesting is how the original drivers for this migration have already begun to change. Traditional drivers boiled down [...]

SMS the crime fighter

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: The latest South African crime statistics for 2010/2011, could probably best be summarised as “improving, but could do better”. While there have been reductions in the murder and attempted murder rate, assault, robbery and attacks on policemen - fighting crime should still be at the top of South Africa’s agenda. With SMS being so suited to sending alerts quickly and easily to a group of people, its capability and usefulness as a crime fighting [...]

Taming the tablet

Archived; click post to view. Excerpt: For most IT departments it’s an all too familiar story: executives discover the latest gadgets, start using them at home and bring them to work, expecting to access corporate applications, e-mail and data instantly. Then there are employees who have already worked out how to access corporate data using their tablet devices, and are carrying sensitive e-mail around with them, unwittingly placing the organisation at risk. As employees at all levels drive the requirement [...]