Defence Landscape
Matsei is well familiar with the prevailing DOD operating environment and understands that solutions will have to be provided amidst an integrated range of challenges. Some of the key change drivers being as follows:
Financial pressures and impact on sustained capability and readiness levels
The DOD is conservatively funded by international norms and that on a continent that is experiencing significant increases in military spending and subsequent capability. Amidst responsible Human Resource employment practices, the operational readiness levels of prime equipment systems come under severe financial pressure necessitating the introduction of a holistic Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) based operating model.
Strategic Defence Review 2013
The recent Strategic Defence Review calls for a much more actively employed Defence Force in the form of missions such as UN supportive Peacekeeping Missions, Border Safeguarding and Protection of National Key-points. Whereas the SADF were conservatively occupied with Force Preparation duties in the last two decades, it will have to increase its capacity for the conduct of concurrent operations from military capability, support, command and control, and administrative perspectives.
UN Missions
Reimbursable United Nations missions requires military operations to be comprehensively managed as commercial undertakings. As such, military commanders and administrative staff needs to be capacitated with the skills and information to be able to concurrently conduct such operations from both military and contractual programme management perspectives.
HR Profiling and Transformation
The SANDF is continuously under pressure to optimize and manage its HR profile to the levels of demography, skills categories, seniority, deployability and structure required by its mandate and anticipated operational profile. This challenging task requires specialist HRM skills and information systems in its own right.
Changing nature of Industry Relationships
Due to the complexity, cost and long service lives of modern prime equipment systems, the nature of the relationships between the Military and its supporting Defence Industry base is changing. Whereas the Military historically capacitated for the in-house support of systems, this is now increasingly being replaced by support contracting with Industry that can take any number of shapes such as Performance Based Logistics contracting. Once again, this calls for the capacitation of logistics contract management resources supported by comprehensive information systems capable of exchanging applicable technical and commercial data between the various involved entities.
General Governmental Compliancy
Defence Forces are increasingly being expected not only to comply with general statutory regulation but to physically interact with transversal Government systems. This poses the challenge of concurrently ensuring Military security and uninterrupted availability of specialist Defence functionality whilst interoperating with the generalist Government systems.
State of DOD ICT Systems
The current portfolio of DOD ICT systems are technologically outdated, functionally in-adequate and suffers from siloed duplication in key areas. This is recognised in the SDR 2013 which clearly identifies that the DOD will need to rapidly evolve its systems to an Integrated Defence Enterprise Information System (IDEIS) if the above challenges are to be met.