Ajman Municipality & Planning Department shifts services online

The initiative, designed and implemented by software development company LINK Development, involves a comprehensive integration of the municipality's systems and processes. It includes the launch of a portal delivering e-services to citizens and businesses; a secure intranet for better collaboration among municipality employees; and a secure extranet for easier cooperation with other government ministries and departments.

The portal enables businesses and individuals to access 18 municipality services such as land registration, agricultural and work permit-related services through a fully automated system.

"Our new e-services are a testament to Ajman Municipality's commitment to delivering high quality services to citizens and businesses,"

said Faisal Buafra, IT Director, Ajman Municipality and Planning Department.

"Not only will they offer more convenience and efficiency to our valued customers, but they will also enable better handling of queries by employees and promote greater transparency. All this will raise the quality of service even higher."

LINK Development, which implemented the solution, has been operating in the UAE for 11 years and is a well-known developer of e-government solutions across the GCC.

"We had to re-engineer the entire process first to ensure that Ajman Municipality gets the maximum benefit from automation and business process management," said Sherif Dahan, Gulf Territory Manager of LINKdotNET "Then, we carefully designed an IT architecture that enabled us to seamlessly shift the municipality's systems and services onto the online realm, streamline processes and benefit a variety of users."

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 providing an integrated platform for its intranet, extranet and web applications, the new system enhances the municipality's effectiveness and accelerates the processing of transactions.

Once users fill in an application online, a profile is created and the application lands automatically on the relevant department/employee's workspace on the municipality's intranet. From there, each transaction follows its defined workflow steps while allowing the applicant to track its status online as well as access a log of all activities and actions related to his request. The fully automated process minimizes human intervention leading to a faster and more efficient process.

Furthermore, The municipality portal is integrated with an SMS gateway that enables the sending of progress updates to citizens mobiles as well as a payment gateway, that enables online fee payment.

The bilingual portal also provides updates of municipality projects, as well as useful business and service directories.