With the benefit of hindsight many disasters in history could have been avoided. The same can be said of most damaging blunders in business. Particularly in the technology arena, the value of ‘first mover advantage’ must be balanced against the ability to learn from others’ mistakes.
Such is the current thinking at the Department of Justice (DOJ) in South Africa, where chief information officer Hassan Ebrahim – a lawyer by vocation – has spent the last five years in charge of modernising the country’s legal system. “We are through the conceptualisation phase and well into the implementation,” he says.
