Advisory board on Community Outreach and Marketing formed

The committee, which includes representatives from various government departments in Dubai, met for the first time yesterday to formulate long-term strategies and plans directed towards its goal of promoting increased awareness and usage of e-Services among all segments of citizens.

"At the time of the launch of the Dubai e-Government portal www.dubai.ae, when H.H. General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defence Minister, expressed his vision of a unified and integrated e-government to ease the lives of people and businesses interacting with the government, he had already envisaged the close co-operation among the different departments," said Salem Al Shair, Director e-Services, Dubai e-Government. "The concept of an integrated e-Government cannot be successful without a coordinated effort from all government departments. While each department has been making significant strides towards achieving His Highness's farsighted vision, the time has come now to collaborate and join forces to devise a focused strategy and move faster towards our common goal without wastage of time and effort."

The newly elected members of the advisory board aim to promote increased awareness of all e-Services among citizens, in addition to increasing the actual usage of the services by all segments of the community. In order to do this, the board has laid down a detailed plan of action which ensures that 70 per cent of transactions will be conducted electronically by 2005.

"The plan that we have devised together as a board works on the simultaneous principle of establishing targets and continuous review of our short term goals so that we move both methodically and through a well-defined process towards the final objective," said Yousef Khalili, Community Outreach and Marketing Manager, Dubai e-Government. "By implementing this in a systematic manner, we aim to gradually traverse the entire range of services offered by the various departments, ensuring that each of these will be given its due weightage."

Once set into action, the plan will be implemented on various levels. Specific target usage for each e-service, which has been laid down as a short-term objective, will be compared against current usage figures. In addition, wide-ranging awareness campaigns will be initiated to encourage citizens to make greater use of the electronic services, with a continuous comparison of pre-set goals against the achieved usage figures followed if necessary, by a review of existing policies.

"The awareness campaigns have also been customized to suit each department, service or specific audience rather than being conducted randomly," explained Khalili. "The users have been divided into various segments and we aim to concentrate on the high user business segments so that we can reach out to the maximum number of citizens," he added.

"The meeting to establish an advisory board was extremely important as it is a collective co-ordinated effort to change the existing mindset of the people," said Maher Al Fadel, Senior Manager Marketing, Emirates Internet and Multimedia (EIM). "We are living in an age when the entire world is moving towards electronic services and it is extremely important to adopt this culture in order to keep up with global developments."

"We are now moving through a significant phase of transition from the point where Dubai e-Government was just a concept to the point where it is becoming an established service. This is the time when we need to work together to achieve measurable results and meet the pre-set objectives," said Ghanem Al Falasi, IT Director, Dubai Civil Aviation. "We believe that training the government employees will be a key aspect of the marketing and awareness campaign and we shall be concentrating on generating awareness among the IT literate people as a first step towards achieving the pre-set goals."

The awareness campaigns will focus on streamlining the e-services by promoting the single gateway to all e-services through the Dubai e-Government portal www.dubai.ae in order to avoid confusion among the citizens. In addition, the committee will work towards developing cost effective promotional campaigns through the centralized use of financial resources. The committee will also actively promote the use of the Internet and electronic communication through all citizen segments.