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UK Government Tax Disc Renewal Website Buckles Under Pressure
An anonymous reader writes When you pay the tax on a road vehicle in the UK, you used to get a paper "tax disk" to affix to the inside of your car windshield. However the relevant records are documented electronically anyway, inspiring the government to replace the paper system with a purely online one. Unfortunately said system was still in beta when it launched today and predictably, it has broken under user demand. No alternative system is available. (The licensing agency actually ran out of the paper disks more than a month ago, and has been printing them out on normal office paper and asking vehicle owners to cut out the circle themselves.) The initiative is part of a larger "digital-first", restructuring of how the government provides services aimed at "meeting user needs".
Another goverment project fails?
They all do.
If one would actually work perfectly from day 0, taht would be news!
Yesterday the phone service was offline too.
I know because I renewed yesterday.
The website was fineby the afternoon.
Why the service had trouble is a mystery to me, the only apparent difference is instead of saying your disc is in the post it now explains this is not required. Nothing new about anything else.
Jason
Their telephone system doesn't have enough capacity either. The Post Office is the only option really.
It's just incredible that they find this level of traffic surprising. They know exactly how many tax discs are due for renewal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The foremost problem is, of course, burning your bridges before you've well and truly tested the replacement. After that come the interesting ones.
The fallacy here is believing that replacing the trappings will improve the mechanics. Here's how they should be doing it: Consider all the processes inside some department (starting with its overall utility; if below par, scrap department, then on to policies, and so on), then re-organise the internals to something that isn't a straight "we did this in paper thusly, now we do it electronically thusly", but is an efficient process based on the strengths of the (new) tools.
And then you do your best to hide that you did it from the rest of the world, by providing several interfaces, digital and less so, to all comers. You want to couple your systems directly to ours? Here's our API documentation. You'd really rather call us? Sure. You want to use a website? Here's ours. You'd rather write us a letter? Please do.
In contrast, here's what I see governments the western world over do instead: Cook up a shoddy website, probably throw in lots of "identification" malarky with either a "unified" but intrusive system, or stacks of usernames and passwords that you keep having to reset, elevate it to the new gold standard, see all function crumble. This is bad for a number of reasons, starting with "websites" being far less useful than paper even, certainly not useful to couple other digital systems with (why automate if you can't take the automating further from there?), and in fact not fit to stand up to the ages. Even cheap paper lasts 200 years, but websites last until the next web"standards" fad, which may be just an apple product release away.
So, instead of the governments' shiny entrances into the new digital era, we have layer cakes of fail; good gigs for overpaid consultants but as we've seen and will see time and again, function and thereby service to the citizen, suffers.
There's a good litmus test for this sort of thing, and it's hand-writing a letter to the department. Can you still get what you need that way, without further ado? If not, the automation has failed.
Their telephone system doesn't have enough capacity either. The Post Office is the only option really.
What's the betting that the post office and folks on the phone are just using the website anyway.
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