Taking into consideration the sizeable population of foreign workers in the country, the national contact center will provide 150 services in three languages other than Arabic: English, Malayalam and Tagalog.
The announcement came Monday during the e-governmental portal excellence award ceremony.
"The awards coincide with the one-year anniversary of the e-Government strategy for Bahrain through which we placed a road map and action plan of the government for three years. The next phase will see the launch of 40 new government services electronically by this year end. Plans for providing services through National Contact Center and services via mobile phones will also be launched by next year," said Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, deputy prime minister and chairman of the Supreme Committee for Information and Communication Technology.
The e-government portal (www.e.gov.bh) is a one-stop shop providing 167 essential services on the Internet. The portal also provides multiple methods of payment through credit card or ATM cards to facilitate payment to the public.
As part of its ambitious plans for 2010, 15 Common Service Centres (CSC); one national toll-free contact center and a mobile gateway to introduce "mGovernment" (mobile government) will be introduced.
The CSC will include self-service kiosks which would be set up every two kilometers across the Kingdom. The kiosks would be set up on either government premises such as post offices, governorates, police stations or at new locations to ensure waiting is not more than 10 minutes.
Target audiences for the kiosks are people with special needs and those who require aid in accessing e-services.
Authorities, taking advantage of the high mobile penetration in the region, also plan to introduce the anytime, anywhere mGovernemnt service.
Using the mobile gateway, customers will be provided push services where they would be informed of due payments or renewals of documents. The mGateway will provide information services for visitors to Bahrain, such as the National Contact Center numbers, hotels and restaurants, and places to visit in Bahrain.
With more choices and demand for services, Shaikh Mohammed said, according to the new statistics the portal attracted more than 5.6 million vistors and is still going strong.
The Kingdom aims to be rated amongst the top five countries in Asia and the top country in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council in the UN eReadiness Assessment Survey by 2010. The target is to achieve an 80 percent customer satisfaction rate by 2010 using the portal.
Last year,the eGovernment signed a first of its kind agreement with Microsoft to deploy its Live@Gov suite of solutions. According to the agreement, Bahrain will be the first country in the world to provide citizens and residents with a Windows Live email account and identification, giving them access to a myriad of services at no cost.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sandeep Singh Grewal
Quelle/Source: AHN, 20.05.2008
