He said it is important to win such a prestigious award in government given the fact that the criteria of the award was very strict and comprehensive. "We have been able to comply with the requirements of the award. It is a recognition of the achievements of Dubai Municipality in the area of e-governance. We have been working very hard for the last three years with the customers and other internal departments to transfer our services using information technology in order to make more customers efficiently focused to these services," Mr Sultan said. He said the success of the E-Government project is not the achievement of Information Technology Department alone. "The involvement of the external as well as internal customers was critical in the success of the project," he said, adding that without the sincere involvement of the customers and their adoption to the various e-services such a project would not have become a reality.
"We are currently approaching 400,000 online transactions with an average weekly rate of 10,000 transactions. Since it is a convenient means of payment, our newly introduced e-payment service is starting to get an increased number of users," Mr Sultan noted.
"At this stage of the project, such awards are very important to us," Mr Sultan said but added that however, "this is only one of the milestones in the civic body's e-government initiative. We should remember the words of General Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defence Minister, who said that "in the race to quality, there is no finishing line," he said.
The initiative is on-going and more e-services will be launched soon, Mr Sultan revealed.
"We will continue to work with our customers to ensure that their aspirations about e-governance are met and the potential of the initiative is continued to be realised," he added.
He said that definition of a long-term e-government strategy was instrumental in the sustainability of the project over the last two years and hoped that it will continue with success in the years to come.
"Co-ordination and co-operation between various stake-holders who were involved in the initiative were important in the success of the project. They included the Information Technology Department and other departments in the municipality, who were directly responsible for the delivery of the initiative and our customers, who sincerely worked over the course of the last two years in transforming these e-services into a reality," Mr Sultan commented.
The E-Government Team was basically a project management team, while "the IT team handled all the technology aspects of the project such as the infrastructure, the security and training. For each and every service, we had a team, which was responsible for the transformation of e-government. The team included senior management and employees for delivering the services," Mr Sultan said.
The team was responsible for reviewing the procedures of the services to see that they are simplified as much as possible in order to benefit the customers. It was also responsible for setting up a marketing plan for publicising and promoting the e-services.
Quelle: Khaleej Times, 24.04.2004
