Richards Bay South Africa - Novell Customer Success Story

The City of uMhlathuze is a municipality in South Africa, incorporating Richards Bay and Empangeni, Nseleni, Esikhaleni and Vulindlela. As the hub of tourism and industry in Zululand, uMhlathuze offers investors and visitors first-class facilities, services and infrastructure. Planned new developments, including a port expansion and a duty-free industrial development zone, will help uMhlathuze maintain its rapid growth.

Challenge
The lack of integration between the City of uMhlathuze's legacy applications made it difficult to ensure data consistency, and generated significant additional administrative workload and cost. Employees often had to re-key data to share it between systems, increasing the likelihood of errors and occupying valuable time. Moreover, inconsistent information on users in different systems made it difficult to ensure security and manage financial allocations correctly.

To reduce its administrative costs and ensure that it could meet tough audit standards, the City decided to move to an integrated environment. This would also enable it to extend information and services out to citizens, as part of an ambitious e-government programme aimed at simplifying access to municipal services.

The City considered replacing its legacy environment with an ERP system, but was not confident that this solution offered broad enough functional coverage or the ability to manage both internal and external users. More importantly, the projected cost was extremely high, so the City set out to knit together its existing applications with an identity management solution.

Novell Solution
To prove the viability of adding identity management on top of the existing legacy landscape, Novell teamed with GijimaAst, one of the largest IT service providers in South Africa, and ran a pilot project. The pilot linked three key legacy systems--payroll, maintenance and finance--successfully demonstrating that thousands of transactions could be automatically and reliably passed between the systems at high speed.

Building on the pilot, the joint team implemented Novell Identity Manager to formalise the integration of user information and access rights across its legacy systems. The Novell solution enabled the creation of a single master repository for identity information, fed by the HR system and synchronised across all connected systems.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Richards Bay
• City of umhlathuze
• Novell
• Russ Dastrup