DM launches e-Gate to promote organisational learning

Announcing this in a press conference on Tuesday, Abdullah Al Shaibani, Assistant Director General of Dubai Municipality for Technical Services, said the new ARIS-based (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) e-Gate which will soon be uploaded on the DM Intranet would help the staff to have easy access to the municipality's internal data resources.

"To have easy and smooth access to the organisation's knowledge database means a lot for the staff. They can borrow the best practices in the field of administrative excellence which were previously applied successfully in any other organisational unit," he said.

Al Shaibani noted that launching of the system comes as part of the e-Government initiative of Dubai Municipality, and with the objective of facilitating the process of organizational learning.

He said the system involved transferring thousands of paper-based documents related to the organizational structure of Dubai Municipality's various departments, their major tasks, performance excellence systems, computer applications, and other work processes, into electronic format using ARIS software and creating a specialised e-Gate.

"To handle important documents involving bundles of papers is a difficult task. At the same, it is very necessary to go through such documents for different departments. The new e-Gate means things are a lot easier for the staff," he said.

Hawa Bastaki, Director of Administrative Development and Quality Department, said the new system integrates organizational structure of each department of Dubai Municipality with their detailed processes and tasks attached to each job positions in the department, as well as the best administrative practices each department has implemented. All these are arranged in such a way that they are linked vertically to the strategic plans as well as the corporate excellence policies of the municipality.

"More than 3500 traditional paper-based work processes and orders have been converted into electronic format using the best available method and in a simple manner. The utmost benefit of this will be to exchange information within departments. For instance, one department can get to know the work processes of another department thereby leading to overall organizational excellence.

Other benefits would be analysis of data, easy decision making, and integration of the existing database with the computer systems applied in the municipality as well as the key performance indicators.

"This is one of the major steps we are taking in fully automating our work processes with the objective of simplifying them and doing away with all sorts of paper-based transactions inside the organisation. We hope that by the end of this year, we can achieve a fully paper-less office thanks to this system," she said.

The press conference was also attended by Ahmed Al Shuhhi, Head of Work Processes and Systems Management Section, who introduced the system to the audience.