He was speaking at the event held yesterday to present the Sultan Qaboos Award for Excellence in eGovernment, which was held at the Grand Hall, Sultan Qaboos University Cultural Center.
Bill Clinton, former United States president was the keynote speaker at the event and His Highness Sayyid Shihab bin Tariq bin Taimur Al Said was the chief guest.
Winners in nine categories were announced at the special awards ceremony organised by ITA.
Talking about Oman’s strategy, Al Sunaidy said, “It includes implementation of numerous inter-connected and integrated projects such as the Oman Government Network, the National Data Centre, the Centre for Information Security (CIS), Oman’s National CERT and the ePayment Gateway.”
He said the official eGovernment services portal was launched to serve as the main access to information and services. These projects went hand in hand with the promulgation of legislation and laws regulating e-transactions in the Sultanate.
Stressing that Oman has given its undivided attention to the development and building of Omani nationals’ abilities and skills in the area of IT, he said, “Through the implementation of the Government IT Training and Certification (GITTC) programme, more than 45,000 government officials thus far have been trained.”
Another project offering specialised training programmes to civil servants is also being implemented, with a view to qualifying and encouraging nationals to come up with new digital innovations.
Other programmes that aim to train and spread awareness among nationals are being conducted as well through the Community Knowledge Centres (CKC’s) set up across Oman. To date, some 24,000 Omani nationals have benefited from these programmes.
As per His Majesty’s Royal directives, the government is providing laptops to each beneficiary family of social insurance with at least one child enrolled in public school, and granting laptops to higher education students of these families.
“As of the end of September this year, around 40,000 laptops, along with the provision of free Internet services for a period of one year, have been distributed. Free training in computer skills has also been provided to these families to enable them to use their own laptops.”
In the second phase of laptop distribution, ITA hopes to engage all segments of the society in the digital transformation witnessed by the Sultanate in various domains.
“A big part of the cost of laptop distributed to higher education students in their first year and to the teachers who graduate from the government IT training and certification programme, has been taken up by the government. Thus, the number of National PC Initiative beneficiaries will be more than 113,000 with the cost exceeding RO20 million,” he said.
Referring to the Sultan Qaboos Award for Excellence in eGovernment which is into its second year, he said, “This award has had a positive impact on creating competitiveness among the participants looking forward to winning such a significant Award. This in turn has positively contributed to the development and enhancement of eServices helping the Sultanate makes many achievements in this field.”
Talking about the Sultanate’s achievements in the international level in IT sector, Sunaidy said, “The Sultanate has won three first-place United Nations Public Service Awards. Oman’s Educational Portal of the Ministry of Education won first place in the ‘Improving the delivery of public services’ category.
The Ministry of Civil Service’s Central Recruiting System won first place in the ‘Preventing and Combating Corruption in the Public Service’ category.”
The Information Technology Authority also won first place for its ‘Transforming the Society through the e.oman Communication Strategy’ in the ‘Advancing knowledge management in government’ category.
The National Association for Cancer Awareness was a second place winner, for its ‘Mobile Mammography Unit’ in the ‘Promoting gender-responsive delivery of public services’ category. At the regional level, the Sultanate was presented this November with the largest share of awards at the Second GCC eGovernment Awards.
Three Omani eProjects won first place in three of the Awards categories.
Two Omani projects won two honorary prizes for the Best Projects participating in the GCC eGovernment Award competition.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Mrudu Naik
Quelle/Source: Times of Oman, 13.12.2011
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