Cape Town – A proposed heatmap showing which offices have long queues at a particular time will make life a lot easier for anyone needing to obtain documents from the Department of Home Affairs.
In fact, several strategies are in the pipeline to deal with long queues. Other interventions include developing a system to issue tickets for overflow clients; creating specific counters for clients who applied on eHome Affairs; developing a smartphone app for the reissue of passports and ID smart cards; and increasing working hours during peak periods.
To improve coordinated communication, Home Affairs intends to develop a heatmap on their website by utilising cellphones. They have been approached by a company to assist them.
"So basically what you do, you check the number of people who are in the office based on a number of cellphones in the area.
"The heatmap will tell you how many people are there, it will show whether it is red or green, by just utilising the location of the cellphones which are in that area,” Thulani Mavuso, the department’s director-general, said when updating the portfolio committee on Home Affairs on the progress that has been made to deal with long queues at front-line offices
The heatmap on the website will display where the long queues are, enabling customers to go to offices with shorter queues.
Mavuso said the unprecedented long queues – brought to the department’s attention as far back as January 2018 – prompted the minister at the time to conduct an unannounced visit at Home Affairs offices to observe the situation at a “personal level” and establish the nature of the situation as well, sanews.gov.za reported.
This led to the minister directing the department to conduct an assessment in order to develop intervention strategies that will deal with the challenges of long queues and to improve service delivery, which was followed by the launch of the “war on queues campaign”.
Making a presentation to members of the committee, Mavuso said among several challenges that made queues even longer was unpredictable walk-ins; the discontinuation of Saturday working hours; inadequate front office space; unstable systems; inefficient work-flow processes; and uncoordinated communications strategies, among others.
To deal with unpredictable walk-ins, he said the department was looking into developing a system that will enable it to issue tickets for overflow clients.
“We want to encourage the utilisation of the eHome Affairs system to say in a particular office. We then create a counter that deals specifically with those people who have already done their application online – all they just need is to just capture biometrics.
“We are also looking at developing a smartphone app for the reissue of passport and smart ID cards. In this regard, we are thinking that what will work for us is that we should allow clients to be able to apply for the re-issue of their documents without them coming to do enrolment,” he said.
He said this would involve the department using the same details and biometrics that were used in previous applications.
Mavuso said Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi was also in talks with bargaining unions to renegotiate the discontinuation of Saturday working hours as there is a belief that Home Affairs is not a Monday to Friday kind of a department.
To deal with inadequate management, Mavuso said the department was looking at conducting continuous training on operations management, service quality management and client relations.
Creating a support system for managers through, among others, over-the-top services such as WhatsApp groups and video conferencing was also being looked at.
A new network architecture was being developed to address unstable systems.
In July, Motsoaledi said his department is "on a journey" to modernise all of its backend legacy systems and automate all front-end processes to issue vital documents.
“To date, the department has automated front-end processes of issuing IDs, passports, birth, marriage and death certificates,” he said.
“The system development programme is ongoing and backend legacy systems are still to be completed to ensure full integration rather than the current multiple interfaces, which are not ideal and causes intermittent downtimes.”
Motsoaledi said that the network infrastructure in which all the DHA systems run on is provided for by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and is often a cause of system downtime.
“A comprehensive assessment was done by SITA in the last financial year and produced a new network architecture and implementation plan which will provide a fully redundant and high availability network throughout the DHA footprint,” he said.
Mavuso said the department was, in the meantime, looking at extending working hours during peak periods – like the first week of January – for high volume offices to open their doors between 7am and 7pm.
He also said that the live capture office footprint had been increased from 184 to 193 offices, with two new bank branches offering the eHome Affairs service being added to the existing 13.
Some 120 officials from various offices have been trained on client relations, service delivery improvement plans and operations management.