The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) on Thursday reiterated its
commitment toward digitally transforming governance to ensure the delivery of Information Technology (IT) services across the country.

The Director General of the agency, Dr Isa Pantami, made the commitment at a Stakeholders Workshop on the draft `Nigerian Government
Enterprise Architecture (NGEA) in Abuja.

Represented by Dr Vincent Olatunji, the Director, e-Government Development and Regulatory Department, Pantami stressed the need
to integrate Information
Communication Technology (ICT) into every facet of governance for inclusive development.

The NITDA boss said that every aspect of human endeavour revolved around ICT, hence the need to develop and incorporate it for better governance.

He added that “ICT needs to be integrated into all development and transformation options, reforms and plans.

“We are committed to ensuring that the required ICT skills are developed in the public service, government digital services are promoted, IT procurement,
as well as deployment in the public sector are properly coordinated.

“Our public institutions form a big and critical enterprise that must be managed efficiently to ensure its resources and that IT is maximised to create value for stakeholders.

“Digitally transforming government as a whole is not an easy task, knowing fully our peculiarity as a country.

“The implementation of e-government must be holistic and integrated before government digital transformation can be experienced.

“My vision in NITDA is to facilitate and lead government digital transformation, as well as ensure the agency plays a critical role in building a digitally-transformed government.”

Pantami said that IT projects were being carried out in silos but the agency was laying standards to break the practice and ensure citizen-centric, smart, innovative and collaborative government.

The NGEA, he said, was a disciplined way of organising enterprise resources like business processes, data, IT, human, finance, etc, to provide capabilities that enable the achievement of any organisation’s mandate outcomes.

According to Pantami, the objectives of the NGEA are to correct the anomalies in government processes, information management and implementation of ICT projects
in the next five to 10 years.

He said “NGEA is aimed at providing strategic choice on how IT should be deployed to ensure certain levels of standardisation and integration are achieved.

“It provides framework that ensure IT projects are scalable, shared, efficient and local content driven and provide clear model with appropriate structure for effective IT governance.

“NGEA is built on government operating model, enterprise architecture framework and IT engagement model.’’

He added that the framework was to provide guiding reference for deployment and implementation of IT e-government systems in public institutions, ICT product, service providers, development partners and the general public.

Pantami urged state and local government institutions to adopt the framework in the IT government system to consolidate efforts at the federal level for digital transformation.

He pointed out that one of the strategic directions for e-government was to adopt a Whole-of Government (WoG) approach for deriving value from IT.

He added that NGEA as a framework for long-term IT strategy and road map for the achievement of WoG and Government Digital Transformation (GDT) was apt and unavoidable.

Pantami said ICT adoption in the 21^st century for any government was the best way to attain Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). (NAN)

– Mar. 21, 2019 @ 03:10 GMT |