Dubai Municipality to offer online booking and renewal of street advertisements

The move is aimed at saving agencies' time, reducing lengthy manual procedures, raising customer satisfaction levels and expanding the eServices user base. Payment could be made through eDirham or credit card. Dubai Municipality is also exploring methods to introduce a direct account to account bank transfer system for larger transactions.

"Dubai Municipality has been at the forefront of government departments implementing e-services, with a record number of online transactions embracing a gamut of services," said Abdulla Al Shaibani, Assistant Director General for Technical Services, Dubai Municipality. "The proliferation of new advertising sites and increased demand for space has necessitated an automated system to reduce clerical work and facilitate rapid processing of applications."

Currently, the booking and renewal of street advertisements is done manually, a time- and labour-intensive process. The applicant first applies to the Department of Economic Development (DED). After scrutinising, DED forwards the application to Dubai Municipality, which in turn sends it back to DED after approval.

"The facility of booking and renewing street advertisements online is an important move to accelerate the migration to e-services. The Department of Economic Development has provided us full cooperation for total integration with their systems to ensure the success of this initiative," added AbdulHakim Abdul Kareem Malik, Director of IT Department.

"With state of the art systems already in place at Dubai Municipality, the physical movement of documents from one department to another is a huge waste of time. We decided to work with DED to integrate our systems with theirs," said Al Shaibani. "The whole process is now highly efficient, saving precious time of the applicants and completion of the transaction within a short time. Dubai Municipality is certainly proud to migrate yet another important service to online channels."