A crash waiting to happen

Lesson 1: Employ a systems analyst that's actually studied the subject and probably even majored in it...

The article reads like systems' analysis 101...

D

Like most other things they this system was a stuffup since day 1. if they actually employed people that know what they doing/or let them do what needs to be done then it might...work. but no, lets employ my friend's uncle's brother's kid or something along that line.

When I registered/licensed a car last week there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the electronic system's response - there was no waiting and staring at the screen which I would have expected. But what astonished me was the process that was gone through, just how much data was typed into the system and how much paper was shuffled, stamped, filled in with a pen, taken to another office, brought back and after about 20 minutes completed - and I was prepared, all the right paperwork and not trying something complex like keeping a personalised number plate (heaven forbid like the guy in front of me; it was his third visit...).

In this case I am a person that (e)Natis knows about having registered another vehicle before. This is a car that the system knows about being pre-owned. So the 'official' needs to type my ID and the cars ID, the rest is all displaying information checking and clicking a button labelled, shall we say, 'New Owner Registration'. Don't get me started on why can't I pay with a credit card at the desk -seems to work in the shops, anyway. Done, sorted, pay the money, leave with relevant paperwork.

A bad process automated is still a bad process.

I'll grant you that new new car registrations where all the information has to be entered will take a little longer, but what were they doing?

Large, especially government projects, often seem to go this way. Personally the system itself seemed to be working: if they make sure that all the staff are really trained properly, streamline the process where possible, make a few simple high impact mods/enhancements to the system. In 6 months the system will be fine and we'll all be onto worrying about the new SARS online filing or something...

Lesson 2: employ a development team that actually used the technology to build at least one previous working system.

Sewell says where a "sudden death" approach is necessary - switching the old system off and the new one on immediately afterwards - because one design is so radically different from another, thorough testing must be conducted to ensure it will work and that the equipment it's running on is correctly sized. It should also be phased in gradually.

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I like the ring of "sudden death"... - reminds me of one of Van Damme's movies

Seems they did a "sudden death" on it... and now it's haunting them...

@excentricdave I had a similar experience. What puzzled me was the large number of screens(>10) which were sent back and forth. Surely good system design would be to minimize the number of screens as each would impose a large overhead when compared with just sending a single large screen. Surely all the fields in a license renewal could be sent in a single transmission?

Its not difficult. You Run 1 Office with Enatis and if it dies or gives problems the rest of the country is fine. This seems to elude the uneducated bosses that want to push the bee side of things. BEE should be trained and admit to the fact of when they dont know. this is a problem i am finding of late.

Same goes to those developers and contractors that implemented the system. another problem we could think of is the Language barrier.

I think the problem was that they didnt have enough time to test the pilot properly.

A gem off the eNatis website a few minutes ago:

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

Please contact this site's webmaster.

Wait a few minutes and use your browser's "Back" button or click here to try again.

If you are the webmaster, your account may have exceeded for one or more of the following reasons:

* Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu.
* Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
* Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.

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And this is supposedly AFTER the server upgrade...