The macro context considers the milieu in which the collaborative activity exists and on which it depends. South Africa possesses a complex governmental structure, involving a diverse number of provinces, local governments and municipalities, with different authorities and responsibilities. Although distinct and discrete, they are also interdependent, as they work together towards a common governmental goal. This makes the principles of cooperative government relevant, as elucidated in Chapter Three of the Constitution, calling for, inter alia, a clear division of roles and responsibilities; a collective approach to policy; coordination of activities to avoid duplication and waste, and to ensure effective use of resources. To account for commonalties, the sector employs a strategy that is intended to take advantage of economies of scale. Moreover, to deal with scarce resources, organisations perform activities that are dependent on the activities of other entities or that enact undertakings on which other organisations are dependent. However, since the stakeholders are widely dispersed and autonomous, discretional collaboration has become the norm. Factors influencing collaboration in multiple ways are represented in Figure 5.4.
The enabling environment of the sector, taking into account the size of the public sector, the number of role players and their physical distribution, facilitates a loosely coupled work pattern. This shapes the workforce activities, collaboration and configurations patterns. The loosely-coupled mode of operation is intended to minimise coordination overheads, as well as to mitigate the costs associated with tightly-coupled interdependences, as these constantly require possibly expensive, consistent back-and- forth communication. Through subscribing to a loosely coupled work pattern, the decision making authority is primarily decentralised, which allows the organisational
entities to function in an autonomous fashion. The coordination strategy in the sector
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the unpredictability of the work-setting, commonly without necessitating consultation with others. Therefore, this strategy is beneficial, since the entities operate in an unpredictable work environment, which requires the frequent revision of work plans to manage local circumstances.
Figure 5.4: Macro Context Elements that Influence Collaboration
The partitioning enables continuous changes, transformations and flexibility in the organisations, as each can tailor its actions and internal structure to meet altering demands facilitated through the reduced interdependencies between entities, with infrequent and occasional interaction.
Despite the benefits of the loosely coupled design, challenges occur when certain dependencies arise. Though it offers adaptability, flexibility and semi-autonomous entities, loose coupling introduces some collaborative communication and information
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sharing difficulties. As autonomous entities, municipalities determine their level of participation in collaborative activities, establish their own schedules and plans, and carry out the majority of their work activities themselves, typically from a general framework, previously provided. Schedules are not shared among stakeholders and they do not have regularly arranged team meetings, so face-to-face meetings rarely occur. Frequently, it is problematic to maintain awareness of the statuses of other role-players, as well as their schedules and availability, potentially resulting in collaboration being difficult or complicated, with only infrequent communication between workers, often only when absolutely necessary and when the benefits outweigh the effort required to communicate.
In order to overcome the collaborative difficulties, as governmental spheres and other agencies must work together, the coordination strategy subscribes to organisational design mechanisms, which incorporate informal administrative hierarchies, linking pins, workgroups/committees, and periodic direct contacts, in an endeavour to achieve some form of integration. Coordination is also achieved via standard processes, management practices, architectures, and frameworks, among others. These choices are adopted to reduce overheads, where real-time communication is expensive. The work-based mechanisms employed to complement the organisational design involve the specific structuring of tasks to be accomplished. Activities and relationships are defined and linked by the roles to which people and units are assigned.
Furthermore, owing to the complex and dynamic nature of the environment, reform strategies engage shared service infrastructures to leverage the economies of scale. Shared service centres, for instance National Agencies like LGSETA and CoGTA, exist to provide capacity building services to municipalities, in order to ensure alignment with shared national objectives. They maintain control over, inter alia, national strategic decisions, the setting of key performance indicators or the allocation of resources. These agencies are tasked with integrating the objectives of the decentralised autonomic structures of the public service. To gain comprehensive coverage of the various activities and committees, working groups comprising members from several factions, are frequently constituted to perform the coordination functions for several initiatives. In addition, they are enabled by some term of reference. This implies that coordination may require the functioning of more than one mechanism in order to be effective.
For example, the coordination mechanisms for general support, capacity building and training aimed at local government include: (a) the National Municipal Capacity Coordination and Monitoring Committee (NMCCMC) and (b) Terms of Reference, to guide the actions of the NMCCMC and their working groups, which contain, but are not limited to, their roles, responsibilities and functions.
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These structures represent the human organisational structures intended to support coordination in the public sector; in addition to the standardisation of work practices and mutual adjustment, where the communicative action, aimed at mutual understanding, serves as an integration and coordination mechanism achieved through boundary spanning liaison roles or committees, joint decision-making and, in some instances, socialisation. They do so by providing frameworks and documents comprising several protocols to guide the actions of the municipalities towards achieving a common objective. However, these require a great deal of effort, as the majority of the processes advocated are done manually, and the information sharing infrastructures are limited or non-existent in some instances. This results in the introduction of lags, delays and errors, among others.
In most instances, the supporting technical infrastructures constitute from intranets, access controlled extranets (LG resource centre), and static websites. Although the government understands the need to involve relevant roles in overarching committees, what is lacking is the support for information and knowledge sharing. While coordinating activities implies that there is an exchange pertaining to what different agencies are doing, this exchange is limited owing to the prevalent autonomy, costs of telecommunication, and the inadequate planning and availability of ICT infrastructure. As the public service advocates a culture of cooperation and knowledge sharing, its integration strategy endeavours to support initiatives that will fulfil such expectations. Considering the decentralised nature of the government, they subscribe to a somewhat informal, but legitimate hierarchical structure, which serves as the backbone of coordination. However, efforts towards information integration remain manual relative to capacity building. While the human infrastructure to maintain the work environment is extant to extent degree, there is an absence of a well-integrated technical and information infrastructure, which could adequately support the distributed collaborative work. This emphasises the necessity for an ICT based mechanism to support the efforts of adaptation committees, set up to ensure coherence and to reduce the duplication of efforts within the public service.
The findings suggest several design implications to support coordination in a loosely coupled environment. Fundamentally, the design solution must facilitate collaboration, while preserving strategic flexibility. Consideration must be given to how fragmented information stores can be merged to improve information access and awareness; how physical spaces, shared asynchronously, can be augmented to further promote awareness and explicit communication; towards support for lightweight coordination mechanisms, for instance schedules and plans to enable mutual adjustments to the activities of others without the need for negotiation, with an outcome that requires
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significant awareness of the activities of others; and towards support team or group formation, adhering to certain plans or schedules. As most of the natural channels for social communication are eliminated, and distributed teams, by their nature, are denied the informal information gathered from a physical workspace, a need exists for a smart socio-technical artefact to mediate awareness in the distributed environment. Table 1.1 presents a summary of requirement, as it pertains to the high level dimensions and problem indicators.
Since the requirement is considered from a socio-technical perspective, the requirements that reflect a more People-oriented intervention is tagged as P, more Technical intervention as T and a balanced combination of both as P/T. FR stands for Functional Requirement and NFR for Non-Functional Requirement.
The requirements emphasised reflect the socio-technical subsystems of people (social subsystem) utilising tools, knowledge and techniques (technical subsystem) to produce good/services for a customer or partners (environmental subsystem). The functional requirements essentially specify behaviours or functions that outline what a system should do or provide to the user. While the functional requirement describes the behaviour of a system, in relation to functionality; the non-functional requirement explicates the performance characteristic of a system, which describes how well, or to what standard, a function should be provided. The non-functional requirements describe how a system is supposed to transpire, describing the quality attributes of the envisioned system. The non-functional requirement reflects the management and operational requirement, ensuring that whatever functions are provided are usable. This, inter alia, deals with availability, capacity, security, and continuity. It can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours thereof. The characterisation of the requirement is amalgamated from both the business and technical standpoint.
Table 5.1: High-Level Requirements
HIGH-LEVEL
DIMENSION ITEM INDICATION OF
PROBLEM REQUIREMENTS FUNCTIONAL NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Enabling Environment
1.1 Socio-economic Resource-constrained
FR1: Facilitate resource finding (T/P) FR2: Facilitate resource sharing (T/P) NFR1: Monitor and provide reliable, secure connectivity and collaboration with customers and business partners (T) 1.2 Size and structure Large and complex
NFR2: Loosely interrelate modular ―separation of concerns‖ (T) 1.3 Legislation Informs and constrains practices NFR3: Facilitate awareness/compliance
(T) 1.4 Constitution Account for cooperative
governance lags in FR:3 Facilitate administration management NFR4: Facilitate economy of scale strategies (T/P)
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HIGH-LEVEL
DIMENSION ITEM INDICATION OF
PROBLEM REQUIREMENTS FUNCTIONAL NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
practice processes while maintaining autonomy (T) 1.5 Political /administration Decentralised form of governance FR4: Facilitate participation and
integration (T/P) 1.6 Geography Physical distribution of workforce FR:5 Facilitate contact initiation
(T/P)
NFR5: Facilitate loose- coupling (T)
1.7 External support Ad-hoc intervention FR:6 Monitor/report interventions (T)
Organisation /institutional capacity
2.1 Work pattern Autonomous and loosely coupled NFR6: Preserve autonomy guaranteed by constitution (T) 2.2 Cooperate strategy/goal Divisional autonomy Non-clear articulated goal/strategy FR:6 Facilitate Identification and capture synergy by clearly defining end goals (T) 2.3 Organisational culture Non-common ground, shared values and meaning, and misunderstanding Lack of a shared culture, in practice FR7: Foster a unified culture of sharing (P) FR:8 Align culture to strategy (P) FR9: A clear, basic assumption about how to behave (P) 2.4 Organisational structure
Fit for purpose structures, unclearly defined roles, accountabilities, and relationship FR10: Facilitate organisational modelling (T/P) NFR7: Document roles, relationship and purpose (T) 2.5 External operational/procurement process Many manual processes and approval points No clear process owners Government standards, and procurement processes FR:11 Properly specify and automate to extent possible (T) FR:12 Inform necessary processes, and expedite approval processes (T) FR13: Explicate ownership (P) NFR8: Deliver visibility and control over shared business processes (T)
2.6 Support network Implicit
FR14: Provide real-time insight into operations(T) 2.7 Workforce Blurred distinction of responsibilities/role focus Non-support FR15: Facilitate role administration and foster accountability (T/P) FR16: Facilitate executive support through value showing (T/P) 2.8 Finance Funds limitation and misalignment to
needs FR17: Knowledge support and analytics for budgeting (T/P) Support
infrastructure 3.1 Shared infrastructure
Limited shared technical infrastructure
NFR 9: Avail flexible and adaptive shared infrastructure (T)
MICRO CONTEXT
4.1 Desired outcome/goal Ambiguous/unclearly articulated FR18: Define clearly articulated objectives (P)
NFR10: Document streamlined expectations (T)
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HIGH-LEVEL
DIMENSION ITEM INDICATION OF
PROBLEM REQUIREMENTS FUNCTIONAL NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
4.2 Determine participants Autonomous entities and distributed FR19:
Model/document roles and responsibilities (T/P)
4.3 Define communication/ decision-making pattern Undocumented FR20: Modeling decision-making structure (T/P)
NFR 11:
Document/Visualise reporting /decision making structure (T) 4.4 Organise activities and schedule task Uniquely defined and isolated FR21: Support scheduling an
planning (T/P)
NFR12: Tailor actions to fit purpose (T/P) 4.5 Determine tools Several disjoint tools with limited
functionalities
FR22: Seamless integration of tools (T) 4.6 Identify required information Align, document and secure FR:23 Facilitate information
governance (T/P)