Directorate of Information & Communications Technology

The broad mandate of the ICT Directorate is to support the activities of the Council so as to lead to an efficient discharge of the functions of the Council. The directorate successfully managed the moving of ICT facilities from the Ministry of Education and Skills Development, including the enhancement of a sophisticated local area network, establishment of a centralised hosting of servers and implementation of additional systems required to support the Council’s activities. Support services of the directorate comprise of (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Development and implementation of medium and long term comprehensive strategic plans for the development and utilisation of ICT processes and tools to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity of the Council's activities and mandate to deliver quality examination, testing and research services to facilitate the achievement of Vision 2016 of an Educated and Informed Nation.
2. Developing, implementing and enforcing standards, policies and procedures of ICT services and infrastructure in accordance to best ICT practices.
3. Development and maintenance of integrated databases on all aspects of examination, testing and research programmes and providing facilities that enable management decision making, and the adoption of standards.
4. Reviewing developments in the area of Information and Communications Technology and making recommendations for the adoption of high level platforms which will enable the Council to up-grade its ICT systems and infrastructure to meet new challenges.
5. Reviewing the status of Botswana’s ICT infrastructure to support the Council’s ICT strategies and in particular the utilisation of remote data capture, web based communications and the automation of the examination administration process.
6. Working with user departments to meet requirements for data management and processes and protecting the security and integrity of the process and the data.
7. Putting into place, cost effective and efficient databases, information management applications and services to facilitate the processing, accuracy and timeliness of examination results.
8. Reviewing end user requirements for data management and developing appropriate platforms, and frameworks to deliver an efficient and secure service.
9. Ensuring that the Council’s ICT systems, networks, applications and controls protect the integrity and security of the process and the data by establishing protocols for access, backups, disaster recovery, etc.
10. Reviewing systems designs, platforms, networks and applications and develops logical frameworks to optimise the integration of applications and maximise utilisation and availability of systems and data.
    

The Directorate has adopted the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology as a means to ensure optimal levels of support services are rendered to the Council and the organisation’s stakeholders. Through its established service desk facility, ICT is able to respond efficiently to all requests by its users and the BEC community at large.

 Applications currently hosted on the state of the art infrastructure include:

    MALEPA - Examinations Processing application

    FastTest - Item Banking application

    ACCPAC – accounting application

    VIP Premier/Employee Self Service (ESS) - human resources management application

    Email

    Internet Services

    AMLIB – Library Management application

    ServiceDesk – service desk application