South Africa’s smart-city ambition creates an opportunity to think more broadly about the communities that digital transformation needs to serve.

By Nkuli Mbundu, Managing Executive: Public Sector, BCX

The city is an administrative and geographic construct. The community is where public life is experienced. A village, township, small town, district and metropolitan area may have very different infrastructure and resources, but the people who live in them have the same fundamental expectation: government services should be accessible, coordinated and responsive.

For public-sector transformation to reach its full potential, digital progress must extend beyond large urban centres and respond to the realities of communities across the country.

The more useful ambition is to build connected communities that are intelligent in how institutions use information. This is not simply softer language for the same technology agenda. It changes where government starts, what it designs and how it measures success.

A connected community is not defined by the number of sensors installed, dashboards launched or applications downloaded. It is defined by whether people can move through government without carrying the burden of government’s fragmentation.

Connecting services around communities

People do not live according to departmental boundaries. A water interruption affects a household, clinic, school and local business at the same time. A billing dispute involves customer records, meter data, field operations and municipal finance. A development application intersects with planning, infrastructure, environmental and revenue functions.

Public-sector modernisation has often evolved across individual departments, systems and channels, creating an opportunity to connect these investments more closely around the service journey.

This produces a familiar result. A municipality launches a new digital form, but the request enters the same disconnected process. The resident submits information online; an official captures it again; another department receives it by email; a field team works from a separate system, and the case closes without meaningful feedback to the person who reported it.

Digitising the front door is an important step. The next opportunity is to connect the service journey behind it.

The next leap will therefore not come from another portal. It will come from connecting the full service journey across channels, departments, systems and delivery partners.

A connected community has no wrong door

In practice, this requires government to orchestrate multiple engagement channels within a single service environment. Residents may choose to engage through a municipal website, WhatsApp service, contact centre, digital platform or physical service point. The challenge is not the channel itself. The challenge is ensuring that every interaction is connected to the same service record, workflow, governance process and outcome.

The full value of digital convenience is realised when the experience is supported by operational integration behind the scenes.

People should be able to enter a public service through the channel appropriate to their reality: a website, mobile application, WhatsApp service, USSD interface, contact centre, municipal counter or assisted community access point. The choice of channel should not determine the quality of the outcome.

The request should create one traceable case. It should identify the responsible service and location, route work to the correct team, allow authorised officials or contractors to update progress and provide the resident with useful feedback. The same information must support management oversight, infrastructure planning, contractor accountability and performance reporting.

This is what it means for a connected community to have no wrong door into government.

The principle matters in a country where connectivity, device access, affordability and digital confidence are uneven. Digital-first cannot mean digital-only. An inclusive operating model allows people to use different channels while the institution maintains one coherent record and service journey behind them.

The principle becomes even clearer in everyday service delivery. A resident reporting a water outage should not have to explain the same problem to a contact centre, ward representative and technical team while each works from different information. The initial complaint must create one traceable service record, linked to the affected area and routed to the responsible operational team. As the fault is assessed and resolved, the same record has to support customer communication, operational escalation and management oversight.

That changes the experience on both sides of the service. Residents gain visibility instead of repeatedly following up. Officials gain a clearer picture of recurring faults, response times and affected communities. Operational teams work from shared information rather than disconnected complaints. Over time, the service record becomes useful not only for resolving individual incidents but for identifying infrastructure patterns and informing maintenance and investment decisions.

Consider, too, a building-plan or land-use application. The applicant may need planning information, property records, zoning checks, supporting documents, payment, technical review, inspections and a final decision. Connecting these steps reduces the need for applicants to follow up across different processes or resubmit information.

A connected journey links the application, records, workflow, payment, GIS-linked property information and approval trail. Officials see where the case sits; managers identify bottlenecks, and the applicant receives meaningful progress updates. The value is not simply faster administration. More predictable approvals can support investment, housing delivery and local economic activity, while a clear digital trail strengthens accountability.

The same principle applies to indigent applications, customer accounts, land-use processes and meter management. BCX’s municipal platforms support financial administration, revenue management, land-use management, building control, meter-management processes and operational reporting. Their value grows when these capabilities are securely integrated with citizen channels, field operations, workflow environments and decision-making processes that enable departments to work together as a more coordinated institution around shared service outcomes.

Integration does not mean one enormous system

Connected government is sometimes misunderstood as a demand to replace every legacy platform with one central system. That approach would be expensive, slow and risky.

The more practical goal is a governed ecosystem in which different systems can exchange the right information at the right time. Cloud-based integration, secure application programming interfaces, common data standards and trusted identifiers connect services progressively without requiring government to rebuild everything at once.

Modern digital environments support integration, but hosting systems in cloud does not make them interoperable. Institutions still need clear data ownership, agreed standards, lawful rules for information sharing and accountability for the end-to-end service.

The emerging digital public infrastructure agenda is important here. Shared capabilities such as secure identity, payments, data exchange and trusted connectivity reduce duplication and allow institutions to build services on common foundations. However, the value of digital public infrastructure is realised only when it simplifies a real public journey. The greatest value is realised when common platforms are accessible to citizens, trusted by departments and practical for frontline officials to use.

Integration and privacy are not competing objectives. Citizens should not have to provide the same information repeatedly to different parts of the state, but government must not use integration as permission for uncontrolled data sharing. Information should move only for a lawful and defined purpose, with access controls, traceability and clear accountability.

Connectivity is part of service design

Cloud-based services have limited public value if municipal offices, libraries, depots, clinics, schools, police stations and field teams cannot access them reliably. Connectivity cannot be treated as the transport layer added after a platform has been designed. It shapes who can use the service, where it operates and whether it remains available when it matters.

Public Wi-Fi illustrates the wider opportunity. Its value should not be measured by the number of hotspots installed but by whether connectivity helps a young person apply for an opportunity, a resident access a service or a community facility become a useful point of digital participation.

Delivering that outcome requires connected capabilities. Across Telkom Group, Openserve extends infrastructure reach into communities; Telkom Business connects municipal facilities, service points and distributed workforces, and BCX integrates applications, citizen channels, cybersecurity, data and managed operations into a governed service environment.

The value lies not in individual technologies but in ensuring that citizens experience one coherent service journey regardless of how they engage government.

The same outcome discipline should apply to every connected-community investment. The value of a dashboard lies in the decisions it informs. Sensors turn information into an operational response, while citizen applications connect people to services and resolutions. Connectivity takes that capability further, reaching people and places that have historically been left out.

That is the real shift from smart cities to connected and intelligent communities.

It shifts the emphasis from individual technologies towards stronger institutional coordination. It includes rural and urban communities in the same national ambition, and it measures progress through less friction, wider access, faster resolution and better use of scarce public resources.

Resilient digital foundations make this possible. Connected services turn those foundations into an experience that communities actually feel. Once institutions connect information, processes and accountability across departments and service journeys, they also create the trusted environment from which more advanced analytics, automation and AI deliver meaningful public value.

Digital infrastructure creates the foundation. Connectivity extends reach. Shared platforms create coherence. Governance protects trust. However, the measure of success remains human: did technology help government deliver a better experience for the community?

That is the standard the next era of public-sector technology must meet.