Pre-digital inertia in SA’s public sector
- Rennie Naidoo
The problem isn’t technology or resistance. It’s pre-digital habits that bend modern systems to fit the old bureaucratic logic.
South Africa’s public sector does not suffer from a lack of digital ambition. Strategies are written, systems are procured, platforms are launched and progress is reported with confidence.
Yet step inside many departments, agencies and public entities, and the lived reality is more sobering. The system is updated…and then the paper is filed.
This is not a transitional phase or an implementation glitch. It is a pattern. And it points to a deeper constraint on government modernisation: pre-digital inertia. New technologies arrive, but they are absorbed into existing routines, controls and assumptions. The tools change. The operating logic does not. on .
Rennie Naidoo, Professor of Information Systems at the 91看片网 School of Business Sciences.