Technology and innovation key to improving service delivery
11 November 2025
Alderman Theresa Uys, the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services, attended the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona where she shared the City’s advances in technology and innovation.
Alderman Uys participated in a panel discussion ‘GovTech in Action: How digital tools strengthen public services’ at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona on 6 November 2025. The event is hosted annually, bringing together leaders from global companies, governments, and strategic organisations with the intention of creating more sustainable, efficient, and human-centred cities.
‘Cape Town has a population of approximately 4,7 million residents. The City employs over 30 000 staff to serve this population. Apart from our irreplacable human resources, technology and innovation are key to improving our service delivery, future planning and resilience.
‘We are currently busy refreshing our ageing SAP ERP platform that was the foundational mechanism we used in 2002 to streamline business processes of seven local municipality entities into a single platform when the City of Cape Town was established. Now, more than two decades later, we have embarked on a process to refresh this platform with the latest technology to improve our organisational integration and efficiency, financial and resource management, service delivery and engagement with residents, strategic planning and data usage, governance and control, and of course, to enable the latest technology uses such as Artificial Intelligence, Cloud computing, and so forth,’ said Alderman Uys.
The City is also within a 10-year Core Application Refresh (CAR) Programme, a strategic initiative to modernise digital infrastructure and enhance customer service and operational efficiency. The CAR Programme focuses on upgrading three core cystems – ERP, productivity (Microsoft Suite) and Geospatial system to meet service delivery demands and ensure long-term resilience.
‘Our residents are at the heart of the CAR Programme. The CAR will improve the City’s digitally enabled service. This means we will provide more digital channels for our residents to connect with the City from the comfort of their homes, workplace, community centres, libraries, and other City facilities. Thus, the CAR brings the City closer to its clients and in so doing, we improve collaboration and trust between the municipality and those living and working in Cape Town,’ said Alderman Uys.
Ald. Uys also elaborated on the City’s Emergency Policing Incident Command (EPIC) technology platform that records and manages all safety incidents from emergency calls to reports from CCTV and other sensors. It assists in dispatching resources based on location, skills and availabilitiy.
‘It was a privilege and proud moment to share the City’s advances in technology and innovation on the world stage,’ said Alderman Uys.
Photo: Ald. Theresa Uys and Mr. John Li, General Manager, Government Business Department, Dahua Technology, China, during the panel discussion at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona on 6 November 2025.
Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
