Dubai Municipality & Senior VP of IBM showcase successes of DM e-Government project

IBM also shared its work with Dubai Municipality as launch partner for SOA Leadership Centre in Dubai as a result of the success of the DM project.

In attendance were Abdullah Alshaibani, Assistant Director General, Dubai Municipality and Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive Software Group IBM who travelled in from the US for the occasion.

The DM project has been seen as a success for the Municipality and the business community who have been using it with remarkable improvement in performance and availability.

"The project was a major undertaking that required us to streamline disparate operations from the analogue world into one system in the digital world," Said Abdulla AlShaibani, Assistant Director General, Dubai Municipality.

"With a project of this size, you can expect to come across difficulties but in this case IBM's systems and services have provided outstanding results in availability, accessibility and performance even after hundreds of thousands of transactions."

In November 2007 DM completed its initiative to deploy a SOA as the single point of access to all its e-services and re deployed 27 existing services directly into the new architecture to bring the DM in line with Dubai's e-Government initiatives.

Now, 12 months after the implementation went live, the two men who initiated the project discussed the challenges, solutions, successes and what the project means for the residents and business community of Dubai.

"The Service Orientated Architecture platforms from IBM which are based on open standards provide ultimate flexibility in the hands of the developers and as such for the end users who benefit from their tailored systems," Said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive Software Group IBM.

"The Dubai Municipality case is an excellent example of governments using technology platforms to enable them to not only work efficiently and securely now but to enable future proofing for unforeseeable changes in the business landscape."

The open standards based SOA is an application framework that takes everyday business applications and breaks them down into individual business functions and processes, called services.

SOA lets organisations build, deploy and integrate these services independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run.

DM's move to a SOA architecture came as the rapid pace of change in Dubai and the large number of multinational companies entering the market drove the need to provide smarter more secure government services at and beyond world standards.

The IBM SOA Leadership Centre
Following the success of this project IBM announced its work with Dubai Municipality as the first launch partner for the SOA Leadership Centre in Dubai.

After spending considerable time planning the costs and implications of facilitating a true innovation centre in Dubai alongside businesses, educational facilities and the public sector, the investment has been made in the infrastructure to be able to deliver greater educational and leadership events.

For example, the centre includes rack mounted Blade Centers and video conferencing capability to enable global integration with reduced environmental impact.

Already 20 dedicated SOA experts, highly experienced in the SOA fields of Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere and Information Management have been hired to conduct SOA workshops, product enablement sessions, events and road shows.

The key aims of the centre are to strengthen SOA skills within clients, partners, and the wider community such as education institutes (Thus addressing the regional skills shortage) across the region.

The centre aims to keep this momentum through education programmes, expanding resources horizontally, opening IBM customer centres and leveraging additional IBM focus with the common goal of accelerating the deployment of SOA solutions across the Middle East.

"Service Oriented Architecture is a critical way of re-evaluating business and technology processes and as such has moved centre stage in these times of rapid change," said Takreem El Tohamy, general manager of IBM MENA.

"IBM have made significant contributions in the region through academic initiatives such as at Dubai University, centres such as IBM's Technical Development Centre and Global Delivery Centres in Cairo as well as the recent launch of the IBM & Intel HPC Competency Centre in Dubai. The SOA leadership centre is yet another milestone in IBM's strategy to nurture value and ultimately business innovation in the region for the region."