The Gov­ern­ment of New South Wales, Australia’s largest state and econ­omy and home to over half a mil­lion ASIC reg­is­tered busi­nesses, has recently failed on the web front. This is not the norm, hence my writ­ing about it.

Their web­site, License.NSW, cur­rently offers only busi­ness name reg­is­tra­tion ser­vices as of this new finan­cial year (July 1st in Aus­tralia), while all other licens­ing types that it used to pro­vide for have been moved to the rather attrac­tive new web­site, NSW Gov­ern­ment Licens­ing Ser­vice. Both are pur­port­edly oper­ated by the Depart­ment of Fair Trad­ing. Domain name con­fu­sion aside, the upgrad­ing of all licens­ing types except for the one most use­ful to the bulk of NSW cit­i­zens is bizarre.

Con­sider that fig­ure of the ASIC reg­is­tered com­pa­nies alone — that excludes all non-incorporated busi­nesses in NSW — and divide by the three years for which their NSW busi­ness name reg­is­tra­tion is valid. There are over 160,000 indi­vid­u­als using the old web­site every year, or about 450 trans­ac­tions a day.

As a gen­eral rule, Gov­ern­ments in Aus­tralia do an excel­lent job of at least attempt­ing to pro­vide a good web pres­ence. Our fed­eral gov­ern­ment has setup as part of (iron­i­cally) the Depart­ment of Finance and Dereg­u­la­tion reg­u­la­tions for Web Pub­lish­ing, and recently launched Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Task­force (tak­ing much from recent devel­op­ments in the United States particularly) — they’re not clueless.

That’s why it’s dou­bly dis­ap­point­ing to see bad pol­icy deci­sions impact­ing tech­nol­ogy roll­out. Back in 2003, when the first License.NSW site was launched, busi­ness name reg­is­tra­tion was the first ser­vice to go live. Now, for what­ever rea­son, it is the last and only ser­vice not yet inte­grated into a NSW-wide, inter-departmental licens­ing system.

Notably, the new web­site states a capac­ity tar­get of Decem­ber 2009 of 250 peo­ple online simul­ta­ne­ously. Man­ag­ing 1.7 mil­lion licenses (most of these annual) across a vari­ety of license types should require a capac­ity of less than 200 simul­ta­ne­ous users/hour. In light of the fact that they are hop­ing only for 25% use of the ser­vice over offline means, and that fig­ure drops to a mea­gre 50 simul­ta­ne­ous ses­sions. Even accept­ing usage at peak times of the day and (finan­cial) year, it’s prob­a­bly not a ques­tion of capac­ity, even includ­ing the addi­tional 450 trans­ac­tions a day busi­ness name licens­ing would contribute.

At the very least, assum­ing it takes only ten min­utes to process each addi­tional appli­ca­tion man­u­ally (fairly gen­er­ous, I think!), the sav­ings of around ten full time employ­ees required to man­u­ally keep on top of things should pay for the sys­tems devel­op­ment cost! Assum­ing employ­ees only cost $50,000/year each (con­ser­v­a­tive con­sid­er­ing com­pul­sory 9% super­an­nu­a­tion in Aus­tralia, plus office space, leave enti­tle­ments, etc.), if only a quar­ter of users reg­is­ter online that’s a recur­ring sav­ing of $250,000. If I ran the Depart­ment of Fair Trad­ing, I’d be giv­ing who­ever runs the licens­ing side of things a pretty big kick up the back­side to spend at least that amount to get more peo­ple reg­is­ter­ing online. It WILL pay for itself — par­tic­u­larly see­ing how this part of your Depart­ment oper­ates on a user-pays sys­tem. Cur­rently, offline reg­is­tra­tion comes in at $152, gen­er­at­ing at least $24 mil­lion in rev­enue annu­ally. If you can kill the offline pro­cess­ing costs and keep the bulk of that rev­enue — or reduce costs and stim­u­late inno­va­tion and invest­ment in NSW — it would surely be irre­spon­si­ble not to.

As a user and tax-payer, there­fore, I demand change here.

At present, the hideous­ness of the web­site and the half-half state of online license reg­is­tra­tion and renewal in NSW is a pretty large dis­in­cen­tive. As for change man­age­ment, for a ser­vice peo­ple return to use once every three years, there’s no great need for con­cern over keep­ing users on board. You’ll have totally for­got­ten how it “used to” work by the next time you need to use it: this sug­gests that any resis­tance is purely internal.

Here’s the rea­son for notic­ing this at all: it’s not the norm. In gen­eral, Gov­ern­ment in Aus­tralia actu­ally does an excel­lent job of pro­duc­ing web­sites. There are good, clear guide­lines devel­oped by intel­li­gent, well-respected web prac­ti­tion­ers, and, when these are heeded the results are glob­ally of a high standard.

Addi­tion­ally, it grates when all the clichéd stereo­types about glacial pub­lic ser­vices are revealed to be true: it’s not as though this is a project of minor ben­e­fit, or for which there is no obvi­ous finan­cial ben­e­fit. Just do it. If you’re seek­ing a ven­dor to make it hap­pen, use the NSW Government’s effi­cient eTender­ing ser­vice… or send me a mes­sage once I’ve jumped through the hoops and reg­is­tered this new busi­ness name & asso­ci­ated company!

Only half-joking.