A Framework to Mitigate Water Billing Information Systems Integration Challenges at Municipalities

摘要

There have been advances in information systems software integrations made in the industrial sector over the past few decades. The assumption is that these enterprise solutions developed for industry will offer improvements to the automation of the water management processes in the public sector at municipalities. Enterprise systems offer information that is accurate, consistent, timeous and complete. In reality, South African municipalities face numerous challenges associated with unintegrated systems, which result in inaccuracies in water resource management. Water billing is a critical aspect of water resource management for municipalities as it is a significant part of revenue collection. The mismanagement of metering and ineffective billing systems results in an average water wastage in South Africa of 37% annually. Subsequently, municipalities need to ensure that there is effective water billing, through the integration of information systems to mitigate this wastage. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework, which municipalities can use to mitigate the challenges associated with integrating their water billing information systems. The research was conducted at the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality, as a single case study, involving employees in the water billing division. Data was collected from a seven-person focus group and semi-structured interviews with two managers. The Nvivo software was used to organise the collected data. Finally, the data was analysed using the principles of thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the municipality has an unintegrated enterprise system where various disparate systems exist. The unintegrated system provides challenges in water billing systems. The challenges are identified and discussed and measures to mitigate them are presented as part of a systems integration framework. The proposed framework can be generalised to municipalities to mitigate similar challenges that they may face in integrating their water billing information systems.