Downtime blights council sites

Nearly three-quarters of local council web sites do not meet the basic levels of availability expected from sites run by commercial businesses, according to exclusive research provided to Computing.

Some 72 per cent of local authorities are missing the industry standard of 99.999 per cent availability, compared with a 43 per cent failure rate among private sector companies (Computing, 16 March), says the study by monitoring firm MyWebAlert.

Web site performance levels among commercial firms are poor, but those of local authorities are worse, says MyWebAlert managing director John Earley.

‘In terms of maintaining availability of web sites, councils are failing miserably,’ he said. ‘One web site in the study was down for nearly a week.’

Flintshire, Mid Beds and Westminster councils were the worst performers of the 100 sites monitored over a two-month period. Between them they were unavailable for 357 hours.

The majority of public services are now available online, meeting Whitehall’s 2005 egovernment deadline. But the take-up of services will suffer if council sites are unreliable, says Earley.

Holding councils to the same performance standards as businesses is not fair, says Martin Greenwood, programme manager for public sector IT association the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm).

‘The survey is not comparing like with like,’ said Greenwood. ‘The wide range of services available on local authority web sites means they are much more complex and diverse than those of most private sector firms,’ he said.

Andrea Di Maio, an analyst at Gartner, says these figures are depressing, but throwing money at the problem is not the answer.

‘Council IT departments need to look closely at what will make a difference in a site’s service levels, and then invest in improvements there,’ he said.

The local bodies with the poorest figures blame specific short-term issues for their low ranking.

‘We take availability of our web site very seriously. The downtime recorded was due to technical difficulties encountered in implementing business continuity facilities during July and August,’ said a spokeswoman at Flintshire County Council.

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Further Reading:

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• Retail sites fail availability test
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