Strengthening For The Future

The period under review has been marked by our continued commitment to the development of our organisational structure to enable us to properly address and improve our customer service levels. During the year 2000, a number of key corporate functions such as Strategy and Planning, Internal Audit, Quality Assurance and Performance Monitoring were established within the Office of the Chief Executive Officer. The responsibilities of the Strategy and Relationships Management (SRM) Department were further refined during the year to focus on fostering better relationships with both clients and major suppliers. In this regard, the Contracts and Supplier Management Unit was set up with the aim of bringing together and consolidating the handling of tenders, negotiations and contracting. Coherent to its primary function, the SRM Department has also been assigned the responsibility to establish a Service Call Centre, for which the preparatory framework was implemented during the past year. The aim of the Centre, which is planned to come into operation during the second half of 2001, will be to provide a one-stopshop service to our clients and to provide first line support over the phone on a 24x7 basis. The Information Technology Consultancy Services (ITCS) Department was instrumental in the development of various policies and standards for Central Information Management Unit (CIMU) within the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). Through its various newly established units, the department contributed to the development of the latest technology for the attainment of e-Government. With security being considered as crucial, particularly with the advent of e-Government, a Security Management Unit was established within the ITCS Department. One of the leading priorities in this field was the issuance of a tender for external consultants to assist MITTS Ltd in drawing up a three-year security strategic plan. The Enterprise Architecture Unit was also set up within the ITCS Department with a mandate to devise for CIMU the necessary frameworks, standards and policies to ensure smoother interoperability of systems within Government, and facilitate the sharing of data. A direct output of this initiative was a Desk Top and Servers Operating Systems Technology Road Map. Other units established within the ITCS Department in 2000 include the Consultancy Unit, the Technology Units and the Information Resource Management (IRM) Unit. Whilst the Consultancy Unit was mainly assigned responsibility for providing assistance and advice to internal project teams working on specific Government IT projects, the Technology Units’ main function was to carry out applied Research and Development with the objective of identifying the latest technologies in the IT field. The IRM Unit’s particular focus was the articulation of the Data Architecture Standards to be applied for new Government applications. The scope of these standards is to be extended to embrace e-Government metadata layers. Staff members of the IRM Unit also formed part of the Drafting Committee for Cyber Legislation. During the year 2000, the Support Implementation and Maintenance Services (SIMS) Department held several workshops to identify improvements required to further strengthen its performance. This triggered off a re-alignment exercise, which was underway by October 2000, and the setting up of an Internal Co-ordination Unit, responsible for attaining ISO 9001 certification and the establishment of service management standards. The Department further saw the setting up of a Logistics Team together with its associated functions. Additionally our technical support complement was organised in a number of Technical Service Units directed to provide comprehensive clientfocused services and support. ➺ MITTS LTD ANNUAL REPORT 2000

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Executive Committee Left to Right: Rohan Debono, Claire Asciak, David Spiteri Gingell - Chief Executive Officer, Raymond Navarro, John Zahra, Peter Bugeja.

The vast amount of projects that were underway also necessitated the introduction of an outsourcing mechanism required to relieve workloads at site support and core technology services. Effectively, the outsourcing option undertaken during the year 2000 was also being considered as a pilot for evaluation for an eventual outsource management framework that was planned for 2001. During the year 2000, the Information Systems Services Department (ISSD) closely looked at MITTS’ Ltd future vision. The demand for e-Government was identified as one of the highest priorities and as such ISS Department embarked on detailed planning to establish how best the department can be structured and organised to meet future needs. One area that was clearly identified was the need for a core team to spearhead the systems integration that would be demanded by the e-Government initiative. Hence plans were put in place for a Centralised Core Team to be set up within ISS Department to provide such services to all project teams. The creation of common components for e-Government related deliverables, would eventually also be the responsibility of this team. ISS Department also worked closely with our Human Resources (HR) Department to identify the training needs that the e-Government initiative would demand. Training needs were identified, for skills such as XML, Java, HTML and others, and an extensive training programme was scheduled for delivery in 2001. For the HR Department, the year 2000 was a challenging one with new functions such as organisational development, workplace innovation and the role of a change agent being introduced. However, the department’s main thrust during the year was set on a company-wide re-classification exercise whereby position descriptions were benchmarked and where necessary reviewed to reflect duties and responsibilities normally found in international IT

companies. MITTS LTD ANNUAL REPORT 2000