The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) has extended the capacity of its Government Command Centre to now include private sector businesses.
"We are now in a position to take on new business within 24 to 48 hours," explained SITA Command Centre manager Ernest de Villiers. "The Command Centre can also act as backup/disaster recovery site or an overflow site for other government call centres on the Government Common Core Network (GCCN), a VPN-based national voice and data network.
"Service is provided 24x7x365 if required, and calls can be logged via telephone, voice messages, faxes, e-mails or the Web," explained De Villiers.
"The only criterion is that the service must be across the government GCCN," he added.
De Villiers said the infrastructure has grown from a single room housing 20 operators to an area with 175 seats. Large displays have been implemented to present the status of networks, mainframes and databases as well as the number of callers requiring service, the availability of operators and call centre performance.
In 2002 SAPS' Gauteng Call Centre was integrated into the Command Centre and the service was further expanded to cover non-IT calls, including external business calls to ITAC, SITA's IT procurement arm, as well as internal SITA calls.
At the beginning of 2003, monthly volumes increased to a total of 45 000 calls with only a marginal increase in operators to 22. "This level of efficiency was made possible due to the support systems within the call centre - which include telephony with queuing, call routing, monitoring of agent availability, workload, and call distribution per day, per week, per month and per year," explained De Villiers.
He said call centre staffing is continuously adjusted according to actual workload as well as predicted workload. Peaks are covered with the addition of temporary personnel.
Proactive network, mainframe and databases monitoring is done for early problem identification. "Ideally these problems are detected and resolved even before the user becomes aware that there is a problem," noted De Villiers.
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