Question NW2946 to the Minister of Home Affairs
17 December 2020 - NW2946
Roos, Mr AC to ask the Minister of Home Affairs
With reference to the Home Affairs office in Nigel which was offline from 13/11/2020 until 18/11/2020 due to a faulty data line, (a) why did it take four working days to repair the faulty data line, (b) which entity and/or service provider is responsible for resolving issues on the data line, (c) what is the resolution turnaround time on a faulty data line as per the service level agreement with the responsible entity and/or service provider, (d) what penalties and/or actions will be taken against the responsible entity and/or service provider in cases where the resolution time exceeded the service level agreement time and (e) why was a mobile unit not provided outside the office to assist citizens while the office was offline for four days?
Reply:
(a) SITA was notified on Friday 13 November 2020 about the faulty data line in Nigel office and were supposed to dispatch the Telkom technician to the site but that did not materialise. Later that day after a remote diagnosis SITA called the DHA Regional IT Officer informing her that there is no sound from the office’s router, they suspected that it was switched off and then asked her to confirm if it had power. It was confirmed to SITA that power was on for the router and pictures were sent as proof and that is when the latter confirmed that it implies that there was nothing wrong on their side with reference number: Ref 20894281
On Monday,16 November 2020 the Regional IT Officer revisited Nigel to check the equipment in liaison with the departmental HQ networks technician and that is when it was confirmed that indeed the router was not responding as the Network Card slot was dead. The card slot was changed but unfortunately that slot was not configured as the password to configure was not working, all passwords were tried and still did not work. On the 17 November 2020, the networks technician managed to crack the password, did new configurations on the other slot and inserted the router as they had removed it on 16 November 2020 and that caused a delay. The matter was resolved late and thus clients could not be assisted and were only attended to on 18 November 2020.
(b) SITA and the internal DHA IT Infrastructure team were responsible for resolving the problem.
(c) In Terms of the Service Level Agreements between SITA and DHA the following are adhered to:
- Mean time to respond is 4 Hours
- Mean Time to Resolve is 16 Hours
(d) The penalties are applied when Service Level Agreements are not met by the service provider in this case the responsibility was on both DHA IT and State Information Technology Agency and the contracts management team will advise on the penalties to be levied if any, due to shared responsibilities.
(e) The allocated and limited number of mobile units have a set schedule and were already deployed as confirmed with various stakeholders as they relieve the offices when there is high influx of clients for management of queues.
END