Dubai Municipality's e-Services featured at GITEX 2005

According to Abdullah Al Shaibani, Assistant Director General of Dubai Municipality for Technical Services, the civic body's pavilion at Middle East's largest IT exhibition, is attracting a lot of visitors who are also offered training on how to benefit from the e-Services.

He noted that the Municipality's stall, which is part of the huge Dubai e-Government pavilion, has two sections. The first section promotes e-Services provided by the Municipality and the second section gives information about the interactive maps developed by the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Centre, which help people locate any facility in Dubai and create a location map for the same.

Al Shaibani said Dubai Municipality's e-Government initiative is poised to achieve 90 per cent electronic transition by 2007. The DM portal now offers some 354 online services.

"What we aim through our participation in GITEX is to make people aware of the e-Services provided by Dubai Municipality. This is a vital issue because we would like to encourage the maximum number of our customers to complete their transactions online rather coming to the municipal offices," he said.

Meanwhile, AbdulHakim Malik, Director of Information Technology Department at Dubai Municipality, said visitors to the DM desk at Gitex were being distributed brochures, CDs and other publications on e-Services of the civic body.

The section for GIS features Dubai Municipality's GIS database integration with other government departments. Visitros are also shown how interactive maps, produced by the GIS centre, help them find locations and facilities in the city.

This section is also getting good response from visitors as far as from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran, who wanted to know the methods of accessing interactive maps.

Dubai Municipality's e-Government project has achieved great success fulfilling its strategic objectives and priorities such as reducing time taken to deliver various civic services, improving internal processes where possible, providing tangible savings for the customer and for the municipality, introducing the latest technology, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Since the launch of Dubai Municipality's portal in October 2001, a total of 3.2 million online transactions have been registered so far. The portal offers nearly 70 online transactional services. Besides, a Directory of Services on the portal provides information about more than 280 services of the municipality.

It has got more than 19,000 companies registered with the portal and there are more than 3,700 business users. A 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.