The Botswana National Olympic Committee (BNOC) Chief Executive Officer, Tuelo Serufho, says the installation of the Zeus Software system will ease up the burden of administration work at the BNOC offices.
Serufho said the advent of the software, which is used by many Sports Associations across the world, will save the BNOC a lot of time in its endeavors to develop elite athletes in the country.
“The Zeus software is an integrated sports management software system that is used by several countries and some of the Commonwealth countries. It can be used for a lot of things like accreditations as well as managing information about athletes,” the BNOC CEO explained.
He added that with the installation of the system, the BNOC will be able to ‘focus most of its energies in the development of athletes, officials and administrators’ as it will cut out on many clerical time consuming tasks.
“With this software, we will be able to better monitor our athletes. We will be able to store all the athletes’ information, their profiles, schedules as well as performances,” Serufho explained.
“There have been cases where we had to run up and down to try and get athletes’ information like passport details ahead of games as we could not get them in our data and this made for tedious work. With this system, we can have access to this information and more as quickly as possible.
Simply put, it integrates, populates and automates all athletes’ information,” the BNOC CEO stated.
He said the software system can also be linked to other systems to update information such as athletes’ performances during major competitions. Apart from ease of administration for the BNOC, Serufho said the system can also make it easier for others like the media and the public to access athletes’ information.
“They (public and media) will, however, not have access to all information, more especially as some may be private information. They can, however, be able to view profiles and performances of athletes as well as their competition schedules,” he added. Though the system is not new to Botswana, with the country having started the initiative to have it as far back as 2010 when the country had its first Zeus Capacity Support Officer (CSO) from Canada, namely, Candice Christie, Serufho said the BNOC is now hoping for an acceleration in efforts to have it fully functional very soon.
“Our plan is to have all our National Federations using the Zeus system by the end of this year. We believe that as the ones dealing directly with athletes, National Federations can easily put up athletes information and this will make it easy for us as the BNOC to have the necessary information,” he concluded.
