Top ICT tenders: IEC moves to increase stakeholder interaction

The Electoral Commission wants to redevelop its public mobile application to offer enhanced functionality and improved user experience.

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Activity on National Treasury’s eTenders Portal is showing signs of recovery this week, with several advertisements targeting strategic technology dependencies which will interest the ICT industry.

All eyes are on the Electoral Commission (IEC), however, as it continues with its preparations for the 2026 Local Government Elections.

In its first advert, the IEC says it wishes to redevelop its public mobile application to offer enhanced functionality, improved user experience and better integration capabilities with other existing systems.

“The goal is to design and implement a public mobile app that is inclusive, secure, accessible, trustworthy and effective for citizens engaging with elections,” the organisation says.

The commission’s current mobile app was developed in-house in 2019 in time for that year’s National and Provincial Elections and saw further updates to meet the Local Government Elections and 2024 National and Provincial Elections requirements in 2021 and 2024, respectively. The application is currently available on Android, iOS and Huawei environments.

However, the application is written in a framework that is no longer supported and cannot evolve to meet the demands for new features as required, the IEC reveals. What’s more, the app has been found to have vulnerabilities and inadequate provisions for data safety, user permissions and security, which poses security risks for the organisation.

“The existing functionalities of the public mobile application must be re-designed and re-developed, with additional modules introduced to improve user interaction and ensure an alignment between the public mobile application to related electoral applications,” it says.

“The public mobile application has the potential to increase voter interaction with the Electoral Commission by introducing new functionalities and making use of the native functionality of the user’s device for an improved user experience.”

In a second advertisement, the IEC reveals it is seeking services from accredited service providers to assess its current on-premises database and data warehouse environment and develop a virtual results operations centre (VROC) in the cloud.

This VROC will be accessible to stakeholders for viewing election results and logging issues, it explains. Traditionally, these applications are deployed at the national results operations centres.

“As the volume of election data increases and the demand for real-time analytics grows, the secure use of cloud services, such as the Microsoft Modern Data Architecture, becomes increasingly attractive. By leveraging technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the Electoral Commission can process, analyse and visualise data such as election results with enhanced accuracy, speed and reliability,” it says.

“Additionally, these technologies will enable the commission to efficiently handle queries and issues logged by stakeholders during electoral events.”

Other tenders that make this week’s top 10:

• The City of Cape Town is looking for a service provider to maintain and support its centralised, web-based, digital wayleave management system. The metro explains this system was developed and installed by Cyberfox CC and is built on the Engage Services Portal core platform. The system is live to internal stakeholders, as well as the wider public.

• The Department of Basic Education wishes to appoint a single or consortium of service providers, through SITA transversal contract RFB740, to procure, package and deliver 3 000 laptops to the nine provincial education departments. The department reveals the procured laptops will be provided to 1 000 grade seven public schools that are implementing the Coding and Robotics Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement.

• The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) is inviting proposals for the provision of a hosted office productivity suite for government departments and other public entities. The suite of software should incorporate e-mail, document creation, collaboration platforms, secure file storage and workflow tools, the agency says, and should be provided through a flexible and agile, pay-as-you-use commercial model, leveraging government’s aggregated demand and bulk buying power.

• SITA is also calling for the procurement of maintenance and expansion of the VMware cloud foundation platform. This platform is used for the Government Private Cloud Ecosystem, which is experiencing growing demand to host different flavours of operating systems. The agency explains it has acquired VMware Cloud Service Provider licensing model as it aims to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service as part of its hosted IT service. This has ensured compliance with multitenancy licensing and go-to-market flexibility.

• eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality is advertising for a dedicated service for the development, support and maintenance of bespoke systems at eThekwini Electricity’s energy management directorate. The metro explains the custom systems support its operational, administrative and decision-making processes, and play a critical role in enabling effective business performance, data management and service delivery across the electricity value chain. The appointed service provider will be responsible for providing comprehensive support services, including incident resolution, system enhancements, data integration and the development of new functionality in response to operational needs. Currently, there is no active support and maintenance contract in place for these applications.

• Gauteng’s Department of e-Government is calling for the provision of an e-mail, archiving (extraction, ingestion and storage) and security solution, including support and maintenance. The department explains the Gauteng Provincial Government has identified the need to optimise its e-mail operations as it relies heavily on e-mail to drive business operations, management efficiency, improve communication and staff productivity.

• The Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness is inviting bids for the rendering of a printing service to all institutions under its control. The department notes prices must remain firm in all respects for the duration of the contract. This means bidders must make provision in their prices for expected cost increases for three years in respect of inflation; exchange rate fluctuations in the case of wholly or partially imported products; or escalation formula adjustments in the case of locally manufactured products. The department states it will not consider any requests for exchange rate claims or general price increases at any time during the contract term.

• The IEC returns to close the issue with its wish to procure two pairs of next-generation firewall appliances with five years of support and maintenance for its production and disaster recovery sites. The firewalls must be delivered with a centralised management control centre for configuring, managing and monitoring, allowing administrators to set security policies, manage firewalls and devices, track events, install updates and ensure compliance, it says. They must also come with assurance tools that have the capability to identify/discover firewall vulnerabilities, security misconfigurations, non-optimised firewall rules/configurations, provide automated mitigations of security gaps, discover and identify firewall rules with no associated traffic/usage (or redundant firewall rules); as well as allow the IEC to demonstrate compliance to standards/regulations such as NIST, OWASP, POPIA and others.