Academic research into government service delivery delays and a solution to this problem, has earned a DUT Master of Technology student a cum laude, which he will receive when he graduates on Wednesday, 3 September 2015.
Yogi Aiyadurai, whose research began in February 2013 and ended in May 2015, was inspired by his desire to make South Africa a better place tolive in, especially for the younger generation. His research was supervised by Professor Oludayo Olugbara; Professor of Computer Science and Information Technology in the University’s Department of Information Technology at DUT.

He will graduate during the University’s Spring Graduation ceremonies to be held at the Fred Crookes Sports Centre, Steve Biko Campus, Durban.

According to Aiyadurai’s research, the lack of real time data sharing across government departments, the manual process followed to obtain it as well as its (data) duplication are some of the main reasons behind government service delivery delays. “You have to enter your personal details in all areas of government when you use their services. You also have to update all the government departments such as SARS and Home Affairs when your address changes. Your municipal electricity and water department owns your recent address data.

Once you update your address; that latest data must be notified across all departments via secure and prompt channels instead of you needing to physically visit or call each department. The SA government has an “e-government 2020 vision” which aims to bring all the government services online and enable data sharing. We are very far away from achieving this vision as this requires massive changes to the hardware and software infrastructure in government. With this research, we can enable data sharing across government departments to speed up service delivery until we achieve the “e-government 2020 vision”,” said Aiyadurai.

For his research, Aiyadurai visited the National University of Singapore (NUS) where he met with other e-government research students. “Singapore is voted number one in e-government where 95 percent of government services are online. I went there to study their systems and to find out how they managed to do it. These experiences were very valuable for my research. It made me feel sad that although South Africa has a very good internet/mobile infrastructure compared to other countries, the government sector is not reaping the benefits due to its oldsystems and the isolation of its departments. The benefits of the internet are mainly harvested by private sectors. However, we can change this,” he said.

Balancing his family needs, fulfilling his professional expectations and finding time for his studies were the main challenges Aiyadurai faced during his MTech studies. “Doing research is hard, but if you have a good supervisor who can guide you, it becomes lot easier,” he said.

Aiyadurai has over 20 years experience in ICT and is currently working as a Technical Owner/Solutions Architect.

– Sinegugu Ndlovu

Pictured: Yogi Aiyadurai, whose research was inspired by his desire to make South Africa a better place to live in. Aiyadurai will graduate cum laude during the University’s Spring Graduation ceremonies.