eNatis is up, but

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 17 May 2007

Government's R408 million electronic National Traffic Information System (eNatis) has been 100% available since Tuesday last week, says Department of Transport project manager Werner Koekemoer.

The system has also been handling upwards of 60 000 transactions an hour, with just 0.23% of these taking more than a single minute to complete. Yet, increasingly irate motorists are threatening to burn down testing and registration stations across the country as queue rage mounts.

eNatis now reportedly performs 10% to 15% better than the old Natis system. Prior to last Tuesday, the system was 93% available, and had a performance level lower than that of the old Natis system.

Koekemoer ascribes the perception gap to a misunderstanding on the part of the public as to the complexity of the system.

"Transactions look simple at face value, but complex validations are taking place in the background. People may ask themselves why it takes so long to enter a few details and print a receipt, but that's not all that is happening."

Koekemoer says in the case of a motor vehicle registration, the system is checking whether, for example, the VIN provided for the vehicle corresponds to that allocated to the make and model of the vehicle being registered.

It also checks if the vehicle has been reported as stolen or whether there is any outstanding government business related to the vehicle, such as traffic fines. The system also validates customers, checking the correctness of their ID numbers, their addresses, whether they have outstanding fines or vehicle licence renewals. Detailed audit tracks are also created and maintained, he says. In 99.8% of instances, this all happens in less than a minute, Koekemoer adds.

But, in a system with 2 500 access points, it is to be expected that some transactions will fail, Koekemoer says. "In any system of this size, there will be transactions that fail and have to be redone. Some fall foul of business rules and others fail because of interruptions in the dataflow." Koekemoer says the data flows over Telkom's 512k digital VPN Supreme data lines.

"eNatis operates on a central database configuration, where all 2 500 sites connect via Telkom data lines to a central database in Midrand. So when a single office is down and the other 2 499 operate normally, it is almost always a communications breakdown," he says. "With 2 000 plus data lines servicing the system, isolated failures like this do occur. What is important is how fast such failures can be identified, responded to and resolved."