30. June 2009 by admin.

STRESS caused by problems plaguing Australian phone company Telstra’s customer service and billing system is forcing the telco’s retail employees and even some dealers into new lines of work. The Australian newspaper reports that the Siebel-based customer and billing software platform at the heart of Telstra’s technology transformation has reportedly blown its budget by more than $1 billion, and caused problems for staff who have to deal with frequent software crashes and error provisioning.

One licensee driven to their wits’ end by the Siebel system’s problems has been trying to sell their dealership since the start of this year. “I am in the process of selling the business because I can’t take much more of Telstra and Siebel is definitely a contributing factor,” the licensee said. “I’m not the only dealer in this position.”

The system has taken on additional complexity since mid-June when Telstra instructed employees to activate all prepaid accounts through Siebel. Previously it handled only post-paid accounts.  “Because of the headaches of Siebel every day, I decided to find another job,” said one Telstra retail employee who handed in their resignation papers last week and spoke to The Australian on condition of anonymity. Support for the troubled system is handled offshore by Telstra’s outsourced call centres in The Philippines, but dealing with the call centre staff has been another pain point for employees.

“Due to the pathetic customer service in The Philippines, the constant error provisioning of customer orders, constant billing problems, I decided it wasn’t worth the headache every day, trying to make excuses for irate customers,” the former employee said. “I just ran out of energy dealing with that every day. The worst part is, Telstra just doesn’t care.” The former employee also said the frequent errors encountered in Siebel were costing dealers to lose revenue.

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29. June 2009 by admin.

Implemented new tax billing software or water billing software recently?  Does this sound familiar?  “With the transition of a new software system, it’s difficult to know how soon the data input and conversion process will take”, Kopp said. What’s more, with the current workload, he needs more funding to hire part-time employees and his current full-time staff has to be paid overtime.  That’s from the Post-Tribune’s story of June 28 about Porter County’s new tax billing software project.  At the previous Tuesday’s the Porter County Council meeting County Auditor Jim Kopp raised doubts about the tentative goal to mail out the 2009 bills by early August which officials had agreed on at a previous council meeting.

Selecting the right software is only half the battle.

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26. June 2009 by admin.

The value of customer reference checks is debatable by many. It’s no secret that vendors have lists of special client relationships that are routinely used as references. These references are clearly biased and will only ever proclaim positive statements for the vendor. However, references in the public sector tend to be more objective and therefore worthwhile.  One of the best sources of references is a user group rather than direct from a vendor.

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24. June 2009 by admin.

The software selection process, whether for water billing software or tax billing software - or indeed any not-off-the-shelf software - is a two step trip: first you create a large list of candidate vendors (the long list) who you will send a request for further information. You select the best suited for you (the short list) and go with them in detail on your needs (request for proposal).  Bas de Baar is an IT project manager.  The following steps come from his Software Projects Blog.

The steps covered below are the ones to get to the short list.

* Define your needs

* Define your selection criteria

* Create the long list

* Create the request for information

* Evaluate the responses

* Create your short list

You see, nothing you can’t handle!

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23. June 2009 by admin.

Implementing the new tax billing software or water billing software is all very well, but how expert are the users?  There may have been some initial training when the new application was installed, but as new staff join and old lands leave, skills drop off if there is no formal training program.  One old hand answers in this article “Keeping up with a computer takes skill“.

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23. June 2009 by admin.

Will tax billing software or water billing software ever be open source?  “Ever” is one of those word that’s often bandied around, so let’s limit it to the next 10 years.  There is a small market for public sector billing software, with a relatively small number of players, and a highly specialised sector knowledge required.  My guess is “unlikely”.  However it’s pleasing to see that in Australia Microsoft cash is being used to fund some open source development - see this story from Down Under.

Posted in tax billing software, vendors, water billing software | Print | 1 Comment »

18. June 2009 by admin.

Good software can be poorly implemented. Consider the Northern Territory of Australia where in 2008 one vendor was awarded the contract to supply and install state of the art business systems across the eight shires. The Local Government Minister Rob Knight at the time said the business systems were part of the job of getting on with fixing governance and service delivery problems in the bush.

Fast forward to mid-2009 when the Local Government Association is calling on the Northern Territory Government to release a confidential report into “a computerised business system used in super shires, introduced last year when local councils were amalgamated into super shires”.

The association’s Northern Territory president, Kerry Moir, says the new system was brought in without proper planning or training and super shires are now struggling to do their job. Ms Moir says the Department of Local Government and Housing needs to openly accept the report and act on its findings.

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15. June 2009 by admin.

The Australian Financial Review has reported that the Australian government is working on a code of coduct for vendors who wish to sell to the Federal government.  Apparently too many public servants have been taking vendors’ hyperbole at face value.  The UK organisation Intellect is being held up as the model Australia should follow.

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12. June 2009 by admin.

As technology advances, new opportunities emerge for revenue that were not considered when the billing system was selected.  A Washington County sewer utility found a way to get rid of some of its most troublesome pollutants: sell them to gardeners.  Clean Water Services installed a system at its Durham treatment plant that pulls phosphorus and ammonia from sewage waste and processes them into fertilizer pellets that are then sold to nurseries. The system, which began operating last month, is the first of its kind in the United States, and it’s drawing some big-name attention.  Let’s hope their billing system can handle it.

Posted in water billing software | Print | 1 Comment »

12. June 2009 by admin.

Software-as-a-Service is touted as the Next Big Thing.  But can the delivery channel (the Internet) cope?  In his recent article “The Internet sky really is falling“, the president of Nemertes Research argues that “For service providers, the Internet is about to become a lot more expensive to deploy and operate; for users, the Internet is about to become a lot less reliable and a lot more expensive (and balkanized). It gets worse: There’s no clear fix. Next-generation Internet projects have come and gone over the years, with little real success. Several projects are underway, but they’re nowhere near complete — and there’s no consensus that any of them will actually work”.

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