Egypt's Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) sets up new horizons with Oracle

Supporting the Egyptian Cabinet's strategic decisions requires a highly advanced infrastructure, the Oracle deployment is certainly in line with the IDSC's core tactic to enhance Egypt's decision support infrastructure, major achievements have been realized in the areas of legislative reform, public administration, human resource development and job creation, natural resources management, cultural heritage preservation and urban planning.

According to the IDSC's chairman, Eng. Raafat Radwan: "The IDSC is highly committed to ensure the best quality of information services, among the challenges are the efficient operation of national surveys, it is worth mentioning that the IDSC had used Oracle Solutions in surveying 5.5 million residents on their respective standards of living, the sheer magnitude of data sets and people involved were gigantic, only Oracle' s Business Intelligence Tools could have been utilized to realize the level of efficiency we aspired, such tools had saved us weeks of working hours, not to mention the resources conserved by using Oracle's in-house reporting templates, one major pillar for our success was a central database through which a number of twenty-seven data centers in the whole country were connected".

Almost Twenty Years of Technology-Enabled Development
With the IDSC celebrating its twentieth anniversary next year, the organization is setting a role model for the entire public sector, not only Oracle Discoverer was utilized by top executive management levels, it was also embedded into the organization's operational level, which simply makes all the difference.

Currently, more than a hundred and twenty of IDSC's employees have been trained to use Oracle Discoverer. Furthermore, the IDSC has been an Oracle Database customer for more than 11 years; usually a success factor to conducting the IDSC's national surveys, notably a single management interface, self-tuning and self-diagnosis are all but major features being allowed through the system, in addition the Oracle solution simplifies the maintenance of the IDSC's ever-expanding data warehouse, offering the world's proven lowest price/performance ratio and highest level of satisfaction.

On the national level, information services and decision support activities are apparently sophisticated, during the past few years, the IDSC has unconventionally utilized Oracle Discoverer to deliver better quality of both data collection and entry, most importantly the IDSC is highly committed to ensure a minimal level of data discrepancy, with that in mind, it has employed the integration capabilities of the Oracle Solution to virtually integrate between different databases allowing the IDSC's employees to better assess data sets' points of inconsistency, ultimately enhanced solutions for discrepancies.

The IDSC is a major founder of the "National Committee for Data Auditing and Validation"; the committee is challenged with different information releases of various public organizations. To ensure national informational unification, the IDSC utilizes Oracle Discoverer in building a glossary for national metadata. The Cabinet's Information Center has also used Discoverer to create complex materialized views without any kind of intervention from Database Administrators; inevitably web developers connect to such views via simple customized web pages.

The alliance between Oracle and the IDSC has certainly set new horizons with Oracle in Egypt. According to Giga Information Group Oracle is the most utilized database for production data warehousing, with 51 percent of respondents deploying Oracle technology - more than all of the other vendors combined.

Oracle Corporation has made major contributions to the development of e-governments in a great number of countries in the region. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Sultanate of Oman, the State of Qatar and the Kingdom of Bahrain are among the many countries that have relied on Oracle's technology and application in order to achieve e-government.