Mobile services in Oman have been the focus of a new study by an SQU researcher. The work has looked into the ICT sector and current m-government initiatives in Oman in order to understand the key factors to their adoption and diffusion. Dr Syed Jafat Naqvi, who conducted the investigation at the College of Economics and Political Science, says the popularity of mobile devices, in the country, is on the rise, thus, creating more opportunities for the m-services. There are clear potentials to these services in Oman and the government can consider more mobile applications in parallel with the current e-government projects for modernisation of the public administration. The current m-government initiatives, he points out, are getting popular with users, which emphasises the possibility of m-government to be a driving force for more e-government adoption and dissemination.
“In our traditional computing environment it was necessary for users to reach to his/her computer for any need of computing. This environment has made it hard for people, especially those on the move, like sales personals, police officers, students, utility workers and citizens interacting with public organisations. To reduce hardship, laptops were invented, and later smaller and smaller devices such as cell phones and other mobile machines were introduced with high processing power, storage, which were light enough to carry easily around with wireless communication capabilities.”
Many experts argue that the future computer technology rests on mobile or wireless computing. As the number of mobile phones users is increasing worldwide, different organisations are offering their services using these mobile devices.
Everyone is amazed at the quick proliferation of mobile phones in the developing world. A recent estimate indicated that over half of the Omani population has mobile devices with Internet connectivity.
Mobile devices are now becoming part of our daily and business lives. Mobile devices have changed how people interact and conduct business, driving demand for the next generation of products and services. With an estimated one trillion networked devices coming into play over the next five years, enterprises are increasingly looking for advances in wireless technology and mobile devices to grow revenues, reduce costs, maintain their competitive edge and achieve high performance.
Oman has now started to utilise mobile channels to offer M-services to its citizens and clients. M-services have two major characteristics that differentiate it from other forms of services, which are mobility and broad reach.
M-services are based on the fact that users carry mobile devices anywhere they go and users can be reached at any time. We get additional attributes such as ubiquity, convenience, instant connectivity, personalisation, localisation of products and services.
Mobile devices create an opportunity to deliver new services to existing customers and to attract new ones. Oman has capitalised these opportunities and started offering many M-services.
Some of the examples are like; Muscat Municipality’s SMS-Parking system, which enables motorists to reserve and pay parking fees via SMS. Higher secondary school students can now retrieve their end of semester grades (via SMS) by messaging their student seat numbers to a phone number designated by the ministry of education.
Similarly, many other organisations are offering M-services through SMS, messaging clients to inform them about their different activities. There are many other applications of Mobile Services in Oman, which are needed to be explored further and to see their influence on users.
The coming age of m-government raises several interesting questions such as: Will m-government replace the e-government activities? Despite its significance, m-government cannot be seen as replacing e-government and, in many cases, it will be complementary to e-government efforts.
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Quelle/Source: Oman Daily Observer, 16.08.2014
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