14 April 2005 Press Release BACKGROUND INFORMATION TO MAYOR'S BRIEFING TO MEDIA ON 14 APRIL 2005: UPGRADE OF CITY'S BILLING AND CUSTOMER INTERFACE IT SYSTEMS CONTEMPLATED The City of Johannesburg - with its utility companies Johannesburg Water, City Power, PikitUp and the call center Joburg Connect - is considering a R120 million upgrade of its billing and customer interface IT systems. The move to a common platform will mark the first time that the customer interface and the billing process will be treated as a single function throughout the City. Presently, the City deals with considerable fragmentation in respect of information systems for revenue and customer relations management. For example, the City and its utilities use several different IT systems to perform the same functions. This fragmented approach has resulted in a situation where information is created, managed and used independently, resulting in significantly higher IT costs as the same citizen record exists with each service provider. We use two separate types of billing applications (Venus and SAP). The use of these applications is further fragmented by each entity having an individual system such as SAP for which the City has three separate licences. The Venus application is also used in separate instances, with separate databases. In terms of call logging functions, the application at Joburg Connect is the Pega System that is partially but not fully integrated with backend operational systems used by the utilities City Power uses eRespond and Johannesburg Water uses Hansen. This fragmented approach is also contributing to the City's inability to provide an integrated service to its residents who now have to negotiate separately with each service provider, and the difficulty of relaying information through several interfaces also results in delayed reporting. In order to maximise the investments already made by the City and to minimise the risk, we would like to build a billing and customer interface system architecture to support an enterprise approach to information and data management for the entire City, including the utilities. In order to provide a single view of the customer, an extension of the existing SAP solution is being seriously considered as the best option for the City. Council is to consider this matter at its meeting of 21 April 2005. ENDS For more information, please contact: Mandy Woods Director: Marketing and Communications Department of Revenue City of Johannesburg Phone: 407 7356 Fax: 403 7738 Cell: 082 553 4211 (Please send sms if urgent) Email: mandyw@joburg.org.za