Western Cape licences go eNatis

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 02 Jan 2008

The Western Cape has become the latest province to adopt the electronic national traffic information system's (eNatis's) licence appointment booking facility.

The Tasima Consortium, which developed eNatis at a cost of R408 million, says the facility has been operating successfully in Mpumalanga since October.

It says the integral eNatis component is a major improvement over the manual system previously used.

"Scheduling bookings manually is subject to human error, is not wholly effective and, moreover, presents ample opportunity for fraud and corruption," Tasima spokesman Philip van der Merwe says. "The new eNatis-linked booking system, which was launched at the Khayelitsha driving licence testing centre in the second week of December, has proved to be a highly effective and efficient replacement."

A dedicated team has been appointed to manage the roll-out of the system in the Western Cape, with Knysna being the next licensing centre scheduled to receive the upgrade. Tasima says two centres in Mpumalanga - Witbank and Kriel - already use the functionality and this will be extended to Mbombela, Mala and Nkomazi in the next few months.

A number of Free State officials have already received training on the new functionality and it is envisaged that the booking system will be rolled out in that province this year.

It is not clear when, or if, Gauteng will adopt the subsystem as it uses a proprietary booking system administered by the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC). That system was offline for two weeks in August, after the GSSC's computer network was compromised by a virus. At the time some newspapers blamed the error - and consequent backlog - on eNatis, but Tasima vigorously denied this.

eNatis replaced the earlier Natis around Easter last year, after a five-year development programme. The implementation was not an immediate success and public complaints as well as computer crashes dogged the project for months. Tasima is an unlisted company owned by arivia.kom, Webcom Consulting and Thuthukani Information Technology Services.