Ninety-five per cent of businesses use Altinn
As many as 70% of almost 1,500 surveyed managers from the private sector stated that they were either satisfied or very satisfied with Altinn as a whole. Eighty-eight per cent also agreed with the claim 'It is safe to use Altinn to submit forms'. 'The user survey generally showed a somewhat poorer result than the 2010 survey, but after an eventful year, this was as expected,' says Kjersti Lauritzen, Director of the Department for National e-Administration and Infrastructure at the Brønnøysund Register Centre. 'It is also worth noting that the users see Altinn as safe to use. This is a positive result that will influence our work in future,' Lauritzen says.
Tax returns made available online
When the tax returns were made available online on 22 March, there was a big rush as several hundred thousand users tried to log on at the same time. As a result, Altinn broke down after a few minutes. The solution was designed to handle a very large number of users at the same time, and Altinn should have been able to handle this situation better. This affected very many users who had to wait longer than they wanted to before they could check their tax return. To get Altinn up and running again, measures were implemented that improved the situation, and Altinn was gradually opened to users in the days that followed.
Implemented measures
The downtime in connection with the tax return being made available in Altinn uncovered capacity challenges in the new Altinn solution. After the incident in March, the Ministry of Trade and Industry initiated an evaluation of the Altinn II project and the platform. The evaluation was carried out by Det Norske Veritas, and the results from the evaluation were presented in a report. This report had not been made public at the end of the year, but Altinn 's central administration was informed about its content and implemented several measures on the basis of the results presented in the report. Among other things, several errors in the solution were remedied, the production environment was considerably upgraded with several more powerful servers, a lot of work was put into optimising the solution, and extensive performance tests were carried out.
Stable solution
Although the tax return in Altinn is most in the public eye, a great number of users, including professional users, use Altinn for reporting purposes. In the annual user survey about Altinn carried out among business persons, users were asked whether they regard Altinn as a stable solution that is available when needed. The results were somewhat poorer than in previous years. Despite the fact that Altinn has experienced some difficulties this year, as many as 77% agreed with this claim.
