I would like to request details on the “new IT printing system” being trialed by the DCC Leadership Group.
1. The name of main IT contractor responsible
2. The software and hardware used.
3. The specific word processing software licensed for use by the Leadership Group.
4. The process that form letters take from being written to being sent out.
5. The role requirements (when last advertised) for:
a. Legal Proceedings Officer
b. Penalty Notice Officer
c. Head of Education and Learning (Deputy Chief Officer)
The Council does not hold information in relation to the specific questions raised. An explanation is provided below:
A full investigation has been undertaken into how a sub-standard letter came to be issued to members of the public by the Council.
The letter concerned was a standard template letter to be sent to multiple recipients. Due to a glitch in our automatic mail-merge system these letters suddenly appeared wrongly formatted and had characters missing when printed. This fault could not be rectified and so the whole letter was re-keyed back into the system (using Crystal Reports). Unfortunately the test version contained a number of typing errors which were not picked up and the test version was incorrectly despatched.
This was an embarrassing error and we subsequently apologised to all those that received the letter. Lessons have been learned and measures have been put in place to ensure this cannot happen again.
The County Council has used the mail merge system successfully for over 10 years for all its automated mail functions. No similar incident has been reported during this time.