By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, Internet on February 18, 2009 at 12:22 pm
The British workplace is apparently split into two camps. One where modern communication methods such as e-mail, video conferencing and the like enable fast, collaborative work across the globe. The other is where little has changed since the turn of the century. That is between 1899 and 1900 not the more recent one. It is this camp where local government seem to be firmly entrenched.
Today, just a few minutes ago in fact, we needed some information from Summer, our incredibly efficient employment agent in London. She replied to our e-mail within 20 seconds, query answered, problem solved. We can get on with work knowing everything is underway in the background.
Recently, we have had a lot of contact with local authorities at borough, city and county levels. Almost without exception, contact has had to be via telephone messages left, days waited for a reply, more messages left before getting answers to simple questions. Or, with the more switched-on employees, e-mails sent and messages returned saying they are out of the office for the next ten days, accompanied by promises to reply on their return.
All very well except the dates in the auto-reply are for last month. Presumably the recipient has returned from holiday/sick leave, neglected to turn off the auto-answer in their e-mail package and put the lack of correspondence down to the recession. On the subject of sick leave, why do so many delicate people work in local government and need to have days off sick? We know one authority where staff even get an allotted number of days to be off sick and naturally they take them, ill or not.
Papering over cracks
The fully paperless office is still a long way off and many, us included, use paper back-ups for important documents such as invoices and receipts. We will be forced to make electronic VAT returns in the near future, making one less form to complete. The last time we investigated, HM Customs and Excise required us to register for electronic filing by getting confirmation of who we are from the Chamber of Commerce or some such nonsense. At least it appears this is no longer the case.
However, local government is still wedded to pieces of paper for just about everything. Complete the wrong form and see it disappear into limbo, waiting for you to ask where your request has disappeared to. Even forms completed on-line are no guarantee of success. Spend some time compiling the information the form needs, click on send only to get a VB error message. Worst still, the form requires Internet Explorer yet doesn’t actually state so. Instead, some of the fields don’t appear in non-Microsoft browsers. That is assuming the council’s website doesn’t also require Internet Explorer to run properly.
David Cameron’s mötley crüe want to pass over even more of government to local authorities, best not mention the mess the NHS makes with computerisation. It’s all too depressing and we haven’t got the time to get treatment, nor the money to pay for it. Unless we work in banking or for the local authority.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Sharon Jackson - February 18, 2009 on 10:45 pm
I agree with you over major sites only working in IE - I recently spent a futile 10 mins trying to figure out why a ’submit’ button wasn’t working on Vodafone.net in FireFox (thought it was down or something). Then had a brain flash and tried IE. Guess what - it worked. yet there was no notice saying to use IE only. Grrrrr.
Comment by - February 19, 2009 on 9:32 am
I think that under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) government sites especially, must run on any browser. This is so that screen readers and other gadgets people need, can access the site. They must also use plain English.
Yet some of the local authority sites I’ve been to are full of acronyms and jargon and are Mac-unfriendly by needing Internet Explorer. The most recent IE for Macs was version 5, hailing from the days when tables were a pretty neat idea and Java usually had two sugars and cream.
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