Dubai Municipality implements a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The architecture will underpin more flexible and responsive services for Dubai Municipality as it continues to evolve and hone its e-government infrastructure.

'This is an important move for Dubai Municipality. We're committed to taking a customer focused approach in our work, building smarter, faster, easier access to information and services from government, we believe that taking our infrastructure to an SOA model is critical for us moving forwards. We need that flexibility to stay competitive,' said Abdullah Al Shaibani, Assistant Director General for Technical Services at Dubai Municipality.

Under the contract IBM will, over the coming year, implement the new architecture and develop the first 27 services on the new infrastructure. With a currently advanced e-services infrastructure, Dubai Municipality is building its architecture to meet the needs and challenges of the future, with the rapid pace of change in Dubai very much in mind.

'The Service Oriented Architecture is a critical way of re-evaluating business and technology processes,' said Takreem El Tohamy, general manager of IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. 'As an approach to adaptive, flexible technology in business and government, it offers huge competitive advantage and scope for increased efficiency based on the mindset that has been driving IBM's On Demand computing initiative.'

The open standards based Service Oriented Architecture is an application framework that takes everyday business applications and breaks them down into individual business functions and processes, called services. An SOA lets organisations build, deploy and integrate these services independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run.

'We believe that for a government to provide service to the private sector, it needs to think and act like the private sector. Our IT strategies and IT-based services have to meet or exceed private sector standards and, in fact, expectations,' said Al Shaibani.

Dubai Municipality's move to an SOA architecture comes as the rapid pace of change in Dubai and the large number of multinational companies entering the market drive the need to provide smarter government services at and beyond world standards.

'Our current E-Services infrastructure has served us very well, but we need to drive forwards and continue to build innovation and efficiencies into our model. This move is part of that approach to the way we are working,' said Al Shaibani.