Nirvesh has been involved in the ICT industry for approximately 20 years. For the past 8 years, he has been the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the City Of Cape Town. Nirvesh was the architect and driver of the City’s Smart City strategy, which Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Cassaburri in January 2005, called a “visionary transformation strategy,” which positioned Cape Town “to become one of our most technologically advanced cities” and “a frontrunner in South Africa’s National IT Strategy”. The strategy also focuses on how to harness the power of ICT to meet the development needs of the city and all its citizens.
While at the City of Cape Town, Nirvesh has implemented some of the largest ICT enabled business transformation projects in South Africa, creating billions of Rands of value for the City. These have resulted in the city winning numerous national and international awards including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Access to Learning Award and the 21st-Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Programme. In September 2007, Nirvesh received a Provincial Honour Award from the Premier of the Western Cape as a person “rendering exceptional achievements and exceptional meritorious service in the interest of the Western Cape.
One of Nirvesh’s key projects entailed transforming the business operations of the City of Cape Town by streamlining and standardizing more than 420 end-to-end business processes on a single integrated transactional system and ensuring that the city’s 12 500 IT enabled staff could transact effectively on the new system. Nirvesh’s “people, process, technology” approach has enabled the city to manage its resources more efficiently and help create a citizen-focused environment. Access to the city’s systems are available from more than 850 sites across the city, where all citizens have access to a consistent level of services. This project changed the way that the business operated.
Another key project was Project Excite, an ambitious IT transformation project which entailed the creation of a single active directory, the creation of identity management, centralized imaging, software distribution and software asset management and the rollout of Microsoft Exchange across the City’s 12500 desktop users. This project fundamentally changed the way that the ICT organization operated.
These and other projects have resulted in the City of Cape Town becoming an international reference site for SAP, Microsoft and Intel.
Nirvesh, under the banner of the Smart City strategy, was the key driver behind the City of Cape Town’s metropolitan broadband network. Nirvesh was responsible for the commissioning of the first (and only) South African economic impact analysis, dealing with the economic impact of the metropolitan fibre project in the City of Cape Town. He pioneered the use of the open access model, where government investment is used to lower the factor cost of telecommunications in the local economy – this is an model that has started to gain widescale acceptance in the country. Nirvesh has spoken at many conferences and has even addressed the parliamentary portfolio committee on communications on the need for municipal broadband networks.
Nirvesh was also responsible for the innovative Smart Cape Access project, aimed at making free basic computing available to all citizens of the City of Cape Town. This project, based on locally developed, open source technologies, provided 500 internet based access points across 100 locations in Cape Town. With 140 000 users, from some of the poorest communities in the country, this project is arguably the most successful digital inclusion project in the country.
Nirvesh has numerous academic qualifications and is currently studying for an Executive MBA at the UCT Business School.
This blog is managed in Nirvesh’s personal capacity and is in no way affiliated to any organisation. The views expressed are Nirvesh’s personal views only.
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