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One of the hallmarks of post-apartheid government policy has
been to bring government closer to the people, inter-alia by a
fundamental transformation of local government. As a distinctive
sphere of government, local government has been given a
developmental responsibility to improve the quality of life of
local communities. The devolution of decision making to local
government has, however, made it more difficult than before to
co-ordinate development between the three spheres of government.
Against the background of a fundamental reform
of planning, budgeting and management processes and the financial
difficulty in which many municipalities find themselves, it is
unlikely that government will have the resources to establish the
information infrastructure needed to support transformation and
co-ordination activities.
The solution proposed by this project centres
around the development of an Open Decision Support Framework (ODSF)
as the core around which local authorities and other spheres of
government can develop their own decision support systems without
losing compatibility with other ODSF compliant systems.
Based on the latest developments in distributed
object computing, the framework will be based on a standard
specification of core objects required for decision support in
government and how these objects communicate with each other. This
will ensure that a system assembled from such objects is vendor
independent in terms of operating system, programming language,
and database software, etc.
The ODSF will be developed by an Open Decision
Support Consortium, based on the successful examples set by
organisations such as the Object Management Group. These
organisations provide the ideal forum where no one product is
favoured and where government agencies, companies, research
organisations and academic institutions can table their ideas and
concerns and in a democratic and participatory way develop
standards which are broadly acceptable. |