OK – here’s the deal:
On Saturday I received an email from the ATO (Australian Taxation Office) notifying me that I need to renew my digital certificates. These digital certificates are important as I can’t do my company tax, payroll tax and Sales Tax declarations online without them.
It is now Tuesday and so far I haven’t been able to renew the certificates due to a number of reasons:
- The ATO application only seems to work on Internet Explorer. My laptop defaults to Mozilla Firefox so the initial attempt to renew ran into an error code…
Not too worry, I’ll re-run the renewal in Internet Explorer… or so I thought: - The website didn’t work on Internet Explorer and I had to send 2 requests for support before somebody contacted me this morning with a known error:
The Skype add in to Internet Explorer has to be upgraded as this is incompatible with the Java Applet that the ATO uses for the digital certificate renewal process.
OK… I think I get it… and lucky me: it worked! That is…. it worked for 1 certificate! Now – I need to do 2 certificates and the process started again:
“General Process Error – An unexpected Error has occurred. Please contact your service desk for technical support” - So I called the Service Desk again… And you know what the answer was? (you’re going to LOVE this one!)
A lot of people are trying to use the renewal system at the moment. The server can’t cope – can you try again later?!?!
WHAT THE?!
Hang on – let me get this straight: the ATO sends renewal notices to a number of business owners (I now suspect I wasn’t the only person who received the email on Saturday). But when these business owners actually renew the certificates, the server can’t cope???
ITIL Demand Management and Capacity Management 1-0-1:
When you send an email to 100 people asking them to renew their certificates…. you need to be able to deliver this service to 100 people – in the unlikely event they ALL decide to renew their certificates at the same time!
If you don’t want this for whatever reason….(I can understand that this might be cost prohibitive) stagger or tier the notification process so you can manage the demand for the service… you can do this! You can schedule emails to go out on different days to alleviate the demands for service and spread it out over a longer period of time.
Maybe the ATO needs some TLC from The Art of Service… 
I’ll be happy to have a chat to them over a coffee. I’m sure we can work something out and make this world a less stressful place for business owners!
Originally posted 2009-03-17 09:57:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi. I am in the process of writing a job description for a Director of ITSM reporting to the CIO. I want to formalize and centralize the activities that have been ongoing in the organization for about a year–best practice processes (mostly incident and problem management so far), itil implementation/organization change, service catalog, etc. I have not been able find an actual job spec on this, and was hoping you may able to point me the right direction. Thanks.
Jim
Jim, there are job specs available and I will email you directly with more information if that is ok.
Good luck with the assignment!
Ivanka