The Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC) has "a few months" to produce a turnaround strategy.
This was one of the decisions taken at the recent provincial government lekgotla, headed by premier Mbazima Shilowa.
According to Annette Griessel, chief director of government communications and information services in the office of the premier, the lekgotla found "further steps need to be taken to turn the situation around".
"Whatever plans were put in place are clearly not having the desired impact and serious challenges exist with regards to customer satisfaction levels," she explains, pointing specifically to backlogs at the GSSC for learner and driver licence bookings.
"The premier is taking the licensing issue very seriously," says Griessel.
The GSSC is mandated to provide a live booking system for the provincial traffic authority for licence bookings. It also handles all the back-office functions of all the provincial government departments.
IT problems have, in the past, been blamed for the centre's failure to manage this process. The introduction of the controversial electronic National Traffic Information System booking system created a backlog of 37 000 licence bookings.
In addition, the GSSC suffered an IT systems crash in August. This shut it down for two weeks at a stage when it was handling an average of 11 000 licence bookings a day.
In February, Shilowa ordered the "collapsed" GSSC booking system be fixed by March after not functioning properly for a year.
According to Griessel, the GSSC now has to put together a turnaround strategy "in the next couple of months", so funds can be allocated towards the unit in the next financial year if need be.
Asked whether disciplinary steps were being considered in light of the unit's poor performance, Griessel said normal governmental performance management processes would be followed.
"It was not discussed at the lekgotla, but there are processes in place for this," she notes.
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