Minister apologises for eNatis

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 08 May 2007

Transport minister Jeff Radebe today apologised to South Africans for the inconvenience caused by his department's troubled electronic National Traffic Information System (eNatis) project.

"The Department of Transport, the contractor and myself unreservedly apologise for the inconvenience caused. I am confident the benefits of such interventions (eNatis) outweigh the inconvenience."

He was adamant that the implementation was not a "monumental mess", as put to him by a journalist. The system has been plagued by operational problems since its launch on 13 April.

Speaking at a press briefing in Pretoria this afternoon, Radebe said the cause of the current difficulties was "constraints in the server capacity to deal with the demand for database access".

Radebe said the source of this capacity constraint was eNatis running on a consolidated single database, containing all national data, compared to the old Natis that ran on a distributed database architecture, with 14 smaller databases.

An eNatis project manager, Werner Koekemoer, later said the database was a terabyte in size and consisted of about a billion files.

Addressing the question why pre-launch tests have not identified the database server shortcoming, Radebe said: "The system was not pushed to the usage limits now experienced and, therefore, the capacity constraints were not apparent."

Koekemoer added that no amount of simulation can ever completely replicate reality. "You test as well as you can."

He added that eNatis allows for 230 different transactions, which, in term of its business rules, translates into tens of thousands of scenarios. He added that no amount of testing can put stress on the system the same way 3 000 users per site, at 2 200 different sites, can.

Fines reviewed

Radebe also said motorists who received traffic fines due to no fault of their own will have their fines reviewed on merit and considered for cancellation by the relevant traffic authorities.

Radebe gave the undertaking that eNatis will be available to the broader public from the start of business tomorrow.

"eNatis was brought back online at eight this morning. With immediate effect, users started utilising the system on a national basis and reports received indicate that the system is operating in a stable manner with marked improvement in response time."

Koekemoer gave the all-inclusive project value as R408 million. He added that transport offices and testing stations in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Gauteng have their office hours extended until 9pm to provide the services to users.

"We will continue until we've caught up the backlog." However, he could not quantify this.