The City of Cape Town in partnership with SAP South Africa (Pty) Ltd hosted its first Hackathon this week on 13th and 14th November 2019. The City ChatBot Hackathon brought various City IT developers; design thinking consultants and operational subject experts together to compete at developing the most innovative and effective online Chatbot, which could serve as a software IT solution, to one of the City business challenges identified at the event.
The City Chatbot Hackathon took place over two days. Participating developers, UCT graduates and specialist consultants were split into three teams who each tackled a business scenario presented to them by top leaders with the City.
The nature of a Hackathon event is that it tends to have a specific focus which in the case of this City event, was the creation of a potential live chatbot for the City of Cape Town website. Online chatbots are excellent customer support solutions for government services as they can process service requests in huge numbers; function 24/7; and help governmental departments to fulfil their duties more efficiently.
‘We view this Hackathon as part of the City’s initiative to drive innovation within the Information, Systems and Technology department, by exposing our developers and teams to the latest emerging intelligent technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, with a view to improving the lives of the citizens and reinforcing the City’s commitment to developing a Smart City,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services, Councillor Sharon Cottle.
The City’s Information, Systems and Technology department is embracing the concept of intelligent technologies and understands how to leverage these as we enter into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Hackathon provided the City with access to the latest state-of-the-art SAP Intelligent Technologies supported by a team of SAP experts who provided the City teams with the ability to drive innovation by identifying other suitable and effective scenarios and use-cases while integrating seamlessly into both their current SAP and non-SAP systems.