Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs Shaikh Ahmed bin Ateyatallah Al Khalifa announced the new services while unveiling the new address of the e-government portal (www.bahrain.bh) at a Press conference on Monday.
He said that the e-governmental portal gives the opportunity to provide key services to citizens through the portal, with the new easy-to-remember address and more services to offers.
Ahmed said that the government had spent BD 42 million to launch the services on the e-government portal.
The portal is a one-stop shop providing essential services such as traffic contravention, payment of electricity and other bills along with pre-employment health tests, all on the Internet.
Ahmed said the e-government authority appointed an independent research group to conduct a customer-satisfaction survey.
which showed that three-fourths of the respondents did not use the e-government portal with three-fifths claiming difficulty in remembering the website address. Following the results of the poll, regional heads of the e-government programmes across the Gulf Cooperation Council met and decided to have an easy portal address for each country and to identify new standards for the region. The address was chosen by the majority of those polled in the Kingdom.
Shaikh Ahmed said “bh” was chosen for the new portal and not “gov” which is generally used for government organisations or “.com” employed in the commercial sector because “bh” represented all sectors of the Bahraini market. “Service for citizens is our top priority, and we are willing to change even the basics for better services,” he said.
He said that the government had spent BD 42 million to launch the services on the e-government portal. The launch of the new address coincides with a new design and new content for the website which now also provides more space for advertisements by government organisations.
The e-government portal reached a total of 8,692,800 visitors with the average time spent at six minutes. The portal is a one-stop shop providing essential services such as traffic contravention, payment of electricity and other bills along with pre-employment health tests, all on the Internet.
It also provides multiple methods of payment through credit card or automatic-teller-machine cards to facilitate payment to the public.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Suad Hamada
Quelle/Source: Khaleej Times, 05.11.2008
