GSSC recovers from crash

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 16 Aug 2007

The Gauteng Shared Service Centre (GSSC) computer system crashed and was offline for two weeks at the beginning of this month. This left thousands of driver licence applicants in the lurch and jeopardised thousands of government salary payments.

This morning, the GSSC confirmed the centre's IT systems malfunctioned and this led to the centre's entire IT environment having to be rebuilt in conjunction with Symantec's anti-virus team.

The GSSC is still investigating the exact cause of the crash. It has been determined that a virus entered the system via an Internet download, but it is not known whether this was due to a malicious act.

According to Emmanuel Mdawu, media liaison officer for the GSSC, "most" users of the GSSC system could not log on for two weeks, as "the system was unable to authenticate their profiles". This meant government employees in Gauteng could not use e-mail, Internet "and other systems in the environment".

Mdawu says licence bookings and payroll administration were the main functions impaired by the crash.

After the shaky implementation of the electronic National Traffic Information System, Mdawu says the GSSC was faced with a backlog of 37 000 licence bookings that had to be processed. While he cannot yet quantify the additional backlog that has been caused by the system shutdown, he says the GSSC was processing an average of 11 000 bookings per day (both learners and drivers) up to the crash date.

This means the additional backlog created could be as high as 110 000 bookings over 10 working days, bringing the total backlog to about 147 000.

"There has definitely been an impact," says Mdawu.

Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa made the GSSC responsible for the booking system, primarily to eliminate corruption, but also to improve service delivery.

In his state of the province address in February he said: "Over the past year, the driving licence booking system has not been able to respond adequately to the needs of consumers." He announced "immediate improvements" would be in place by "the end of the financial year".

"A new system, integrating SMS, telephone, Internet and walk-in bookings, will be introduced," Shilowa added. "Booking terminals will be installed at every testing centre and a direct online link created between each centre and the GSSC call centre."

Salary issues

The GSSC handles the payroll of the entire Gauteng government staff contingent of 120 000. However, Mdawu says the centre had a business continuity plan in place and managed to pay all the state employees that were to be paid by the 15th of this month.

"We were able to evoke the disaster recovery side and prioritise salaries," says Mdawu.

He adds that, while the GSSC's ability to pay external service providers did slow down during the crash, "we are still meeting our targets in terms of our service level agreements".

Mdawu says the GSSC IT environment "was rebuilt over the weekend of 11 August and users were able to resume activity on Monday, 13 August".

He says the centre is awaiting a report on how it can prevent this kind of crash from recurring in future.