Dubai Municipality bags Best Middle East e-Government Portal award

Qassim Sultan, Director General of Dubai Municipality received the award from His Highness Prince Ambassador Mohammed Bin Saud Bin Khaled, General Manager of the Information and Studies Centre of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The award recognizes an Internet portal that offers combined e-Government services provided by different government organizations as a one stop shop where businesses and citizens can gain access to all government services.

It identifies and recognizes government portal best practices that serves as an example for regional e-Government organizations, providing a solid example of how to create a vibrant, easy to use, informative, and transactional site for government workers and the citizens of the region.

The Middle East ICT Excellence Awards focus on the region's e-Government achievements and aim to be a yardstick for regional excellence in e-Government and related activities. The awards were conceived in 1995 to recognize and promote qualitative technological and entrepreneurial achievements within the regional ICT industry. The awards emphasize innovative technology applications and business management practices that have brought measurable and concrete benefits to the organization.

The nominated organizations are assessed based on the quality of technology, efficient user practices for implementation, trends and issues in conjunction with worldwide industrial standards.

According to the criteria of the Best Middle East e-Government Portal award, the portal should be dynamic, service-driven and act as an information resource for businesses and citizens by providing them with information and transactional services. It should be a one stop shop offering access to e-Government services of various government ministries or departments.

Dubai Municipality, which has received the Pan Arab Web Award 2005 and the Dubai Government Excellence Award in 2003, is regarded as one of the largest establishments in Dubai in terms of the number of people it employs, the volume of services it provides to the public and the projects it carries out. Established in the 1940s with three staff, it has now become a large organization with 12,180 employees.

The e-Government initiative of Dubai Municipality, started in 1999, has been a pioneer in providing e-services not only in Dubai but in the region as well. It holds major share of e-services provided by the Dubai e-Government. All its services are provided through one access point, which is the DM portal www.dm.gov.ae.

The Municipality portal, which has recently crossed the one million mark in online transactions, currently offers over 300 online services where 76 are primary services while the remaining cover informative, procedural and easy access to various forms required for applying for municipal services. It has got more than 19,000 companies registered with the portal and there are more than 3,700 business users.

The Customer Satisfaction survey, conducted in 2004 to find out the service level of main e-service categories, has shown that 78% of the customers rate the Municipality's e-services as excellent.