Inaugural eGovernment Award to announce 1st GCC winner at eGovernment Conference in Oman

Entries for the first GCC eGovernment Award, which will become an annual event, are now being submitted from Government departments and bodies from across the GCC with awards and recognition to be given in five separate categories of excellence.

The eGovernment Award has been created by the six eGovernment bodies in the GCC with the objective of rewarding ideas that help towards transforming and improving institutional performance and, delivers world-class standards of eGovernance excellence in countries across the GCC.

Running concurrent to the conference will be an exhibition on eGovernance projects from the six participating GCC countries. This exhibition will present a platform to showcase national, regional, and international achievements throughout the GCC eGovernment region. It will be from this exhibition that the winners of the eGovernment Awards will be selected.

There will be a total of 5 different categories within the overall GCC eGovernment Award:

E-Services - An award that recognizes outstanding achievement in the delivery of end-to-end electronic services that are offered to the public, with a clear focus on ensuring improvements to their quality of life.

E-Content - This rewards online presence or a digital work product that has clearly demonstrated a high standard of content; design; accessibility; originality; professionalism and overall efficiency.

E-Maturity - A category that has been created to showcase initiatives that display best-in-class mature ICT infrastructure that provides a standard, reliable and secure infrastructure for managing information.

E-Economy - Projects will be recognised for implementing best practices in the use of ICT to contribute to the economy of the nation directly and/or indirectly.

E-Project - To recognize and reward highly innovative, value-added, time and cost saving projects that are able to successfully serve the larger segments of society.

The winners from each category, in addition to one overall winner, will each receive a trophy and citation at a special final awards gala that to be held in Muscat on the final day of the 1st GCC eGovernment Conference, 23 December.

A jury comprising 8 international and regional ICT experts from Austria, Bahrain, Dubai, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland will evaluate and decide on the winning entries for each of the five eGovernment Award categories.

Every year the eGovernment Award will be hosted by a different GCC country and this year it will be hosted by Oman as part of the 1st GCC eGovernment Conference, under the patronage of the Information Technology Authority (ITA).

The 3-day conference is being hosted by Oman in recognition of the rapid growth of the eGovernment sector in Oman and the country's growing advancement in its delivery of electronic services (eServices) to citizens and residents across the country.

The quality and importance of the conference has attracted CEOs from eGovernment authorities in the Gulf to be among the high profile speakers who will also include leaders from some of the world's ICT organizations, in addition to academics from select institutions.

The conference will create a platform for GCC eGovernment authorities to share their experiences, discuss the challenges of implementing eGovernance, agree on the priority eServices to provide in the GCC, explore ways of linking eGovernment portals of member states and to examine the possibility of establishing a unified GCC ePayment gateway.