Sultan felicitates Mr. Julfar, Assistant Director General for Financial and Properties Affairs. Qassim Sultan, Director General of Dubai Municipality, said in a ceremony on Sunday that the municipality's web portal has accomplished recently the 700,000th online transaction since it was launched in October 2001. He noted that this was largely due to the user-friendly services the municipality offers online. 'The Dubai e-Government initiative, a brainchild of General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Minister of Defence, has yielded several positive results for the government departments in the emirate, particularly Dubai Municipality. We have now reduced the number of visits our customers make to the municipality offices and saved time, money and energy for both the government as well as the customers,' said Mr. Sultan, addressing a group of Dubai Municipality officials, employees and others including staff of IBM Middle East who joined hands in undertaking the e-Government project.
He said that Dubai Municipality now has an electronic transaction rate of 93 per cent vis-à-vis manual transactions. On a daily basis, an average 1750 online transactions are being carried out.
'When we launched the project three years ago, this was just 48 transactions a month,' noted Mr. Sultan.
Meanwhile, listing accomplishments of the e-Govt initiative in Dubai Municipality, Hussein Nasser Lootah, Assistant Director General for Planning and Building Affairs and Head of the e-Government Committee at the municipality, said 43 per cent of the online transactions are being carried out during the evening hours - an indication of the high popularity and usability of the civic e-Services.
'This was one of our objectives when we started the e-Govt initiative. Customers can do the transactions 24 hours a day without bothering about the working hours of our offices,' said Mr Lootah.
He noted that 25 per cent of the transactions involved electronic payment which eliminates all kinds of physical visits of the customers to the municipality. 'This facility wasn't there in the beginning. So despite the e-Services customers used to visit the offices at least once during their transactions to pay for the services. But now, that even is not required,' he said.
As many as 4000 companies are registered users of the municipal e-Services. Altogether, these companies have a total of 10,000 authorized staff who have been provided with a user name and password. In addition, 2500 persons have been registered as general users.
'We have also conducted 108 training courses on e-Government for both the users as well as our staff on how to benefit from the e-Services. At present, the DM web portal includes nearly 10,000 web pages and 350 municipality staff are involved in the project. A dedicated e-Govt counter at the DM headquarters offers all kinds of assistance and guidance to the public on the online services,' he said.
Mahmoud Bastaki from the Dubai e-Government Project Office, and Samer Shaar, General Manager, IBM Middle East, also attended the ceremony. Some 84 staff from the municipality, as well as nine employees of the IBM were felicitated during the ceremony.
Autor: Christine H. Andersen
Quelle: AME Info, 25.10.2004
