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Efforts towards short-term Capacity Building (CB) interventions in the South African (SA) public sector are fragmented. As mandated by the Constitution, all spheres of government and all the entities within each sphere must support each other to provide for a transparent, accountable and coherent government for the nation as a whole. The mandate charges the national, provincial and district municipalities with the responsibility of building capacity in the local government. As such, part of the framework strategies requires them, to fulfil a coordination and capacity support role. Where ever possible, a collaborative approach to capacity building should be taken to avoid duplication and ensure maximum utilization of resources.

Therefore, finding ways for the distinct spheres of government to coordinate and cooperate with each other and other partners is necessary to achieve better overall service. This paper describes and motivates an architecture based on existing ICT technologies to enhance training coordination in the SA public sector. The proposal is based on lessons from a new organizational form referred to as the Virtual Organization and meta-scheduling, a concept encountered in grid computing.

Inspired by Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Virtual Organizations represents flexible networks of independent, globally distributed entities (individuals or institutions) that share knowledge and resources and work toward a common goal. The flexibility is brought about by reconfigurable networks of computer based communications that allow organizations to coordinate their activities and also a management philosophy based on collaboration and innovation.

Prominent research communities like grid computing and business-management have embraced the challenge of exploring and creating the necessary infrastructure to support virtual organizations. Significant progress has been made over the past decade where Virtual Organizations has been successfully realized in a growing set of domains ranging from collaborative work in business and science, aircraft engineering, multiplayer games, medical data management and supply networks.

At the core of a grid system is the management entity, commonly known as a Meta scheduler (grid resource broker), which matches computing resources to workload requests for execution based on policies. The grid middleware provides coordinated access to the underlying resources of a Virtual Organization, regardless of their physical location or access mechanisms. However, the need for interoperability among grid systems reflects the reality that there are numerous organization and institutions that would like to collaborate and share their resources, but still need to operate independently and autonomously.

The autonomous nature of the SA governmental spheres and of training service providers necessitates a management “entity” to effectively coordinate short-term capacity building training within the SA public sector. This entity does not have to be a physical organisational structure, but could be virtual. Thus there is a need for an interoperable and scalable architecture that is capable of supporting heterogeneous distributed but yet autonomous environments. This would allow for an infrastructure to manage training activities in terms of schedule and resource negotiation, including conflict resolution; a critical requirement if the South African government wishes to fulfil its capacity building mandate.

This paper describes and motivates an architecture to enhance the coordination of short-term capacity building training in SA public sector from Virtual Organization and grid meta-scheduling lenses.