Inland Revenue and its main IT supplier EDS have set up an action
team to tackle the concerns of tax office staff about system
downtime and the time taken to fix computer problems.
The initiative follows a customer satisfaction survey of 600 tax
office staff by the department's business services division and
EDS. Staff were asked about the quality, performance and
functionality of the systems, and whether problems were fixed
quickly enough. EDS runs the department's IT systems under a
10-year £2.4bn contract which began in 1994.
The main concern among staff who replied to the survey was "problem
handling", says Insight, Inland Revenue's staff newsletter. Scoring
from a low of one to a high of six, staff rated problem handling at
an average of 3.5 in April this year, almost unchanged since
October 2000. This compares with an average of 4.1 for system
functionality, 3.8 for system quality and 3.7 for performance.
"Your comments tell us that we need to do more to improve system
quality and performance but problem handling remains your main
worry," says Insight. "People want to know how long it will take to
fix things and there are concerns about what alternative work is
possible during system downtime."
Inland Revenue says a new action team will seek to identify changes
or new processes that will improve the quality of the service. The
team will also visit respondents to the survey to ensure that
management understands the concerns.
An EDS spokesman said, "We take the results [of the survey] very
seriously." He said the people surveyed were a representative
sample of the 50,000 end-users.