By CHILA NAMAIKO –
PARLIAMENT heard yesterday that restoration of the collapsed central computing system at the Ministry of Finance is now at 95 per cent completion, and that operation will resume within next month.
Finance Minister Margaret Mwanakatwe informed the House that in the meantime, business processes had continued using manual operation although at a slower service delivery rate.
Updating the House in a ministerial statement on the collapsed central computing system at the ministry, the minister said restoration took a bit of time because of the extent of damage to the equipment.
She said when the failure occurred, immediate efforts to restore the system using backup data failed because it was discovered that data for recent backup also contained corrupted data as the damage to equipment took place over a period of time, but only took its tore last month.
“Mr Speaker, the House may wish to know that the system reconstruction and data recovery process is being done by a combined team of Government project, consultants (a joint venture comprising Novabase Business Solutions of Portugal and Seidor of Spain) who have been contracted to implement the contract to plan, design and implement IFMIS systems enhancement and interfaces project and Sap Germany, the software application providers, “he said.
Ms Mwanakatwe said at the time of failure, the Government had already taken steps to replace the old equipment and, as such, the new equipment had been installed and the process to migrate the system from the old equipment to the new hardware had already commenced.
The team working on restoration of the new equipment had been working around the clock to restore the system and that substantial progress had been made to restore it.
The minister said tests to verify the proper functioning of the recovered components of the system were ongoing and had so far been positive.
In response to UPND Mazabuka Member of Parliament (MP) Garry Nkombo on whether the collapse of computing system had caused delays in the disbursement of civil servants’ salaries, Ms Mwanakatwe dismissed the claim, saying the Government yesterday released salaries for civil servants for this month.