the practical steps we have taken
to implement His Highness Sheikh
Mohammed’s initiative and directives
of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
Dubai Crown Prince and Chairman
of Dubai Executive Council to accel-
erate the transformation into smart
government, a specialized team in
the department has started to con-
duct researches and analyze relative
international experiences in order to
come up with 5 documents defining
policies, guidelines and standards
of this transformation. These docu-
ments will be circulated to all govern-
ment entities in Dubai with the aim to
formulate a unified strategy for trans
-
forming into a smart government and
proceed with implementing it. The
team will also help government enti-
ties to overcome the expected chal-
lenges for delivering all government
services through smart phones with-
in 24 months as per His Highness
Sheikh Mohammed’s directives. We
have completed 3 documents so far”.
On the importance of these docu-
ments, bin Humaidan said: “these
documents will include guidelines
that can help support the smart
government readiness, ensure high
quality of services provided through
smart platforms and constitutes a
unified reference for local govern
-
ment entities in this respect. We
urge our government partners to use
these standards and guidelines to
help them launch their applications
on smart phones and to offer the
public a unified strategy that meet
their requirements and expectations.
For his part, Rashid Lahij Al Man-
soori, Director General of Abu Dhabi
Systems and Information Center,
indicated that “Abu Dhabi eGovern-
ment has successfully managed in
the past few months to complete the
first main step towards creating an
integrated platform that combines
all government services in one stop,
noting that Abu Dhabi Government
portal currently includes 1100 servic-
es provided by 95 government enti-
ties and institutions”.
Al Mansoori added: “since the launch
of the smart government initiative by
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed
bin Rashid Al Maktoum, part of these
services have already been trans-
formed into ‘smart phone applica-
tions’. The remaining services will be
transformed in 2014”.
He underlined that in parallel to this
transformation “efforts are focused
as well on developing strategic vi-
sions that can lead to a sort of inte-
gration between the electronic and
smart platforms so as to create a
single platform that can provide cus-
tomers with all government services
with the least time and efforts”.
From the private sector and entities
responsible for providing the techno-
logical infrastructure that will support
the transition into smart government,
Senior Vice-President of ICT at Eti-
salat, Abdullah Hashim, said that
Etisalat and the German business
software giant “SAP” will launch a
public application development plat-
form that will allow government en-
tities to easily design and operate
their apps. The platform will contain
pre-designed apps that government
entities can customize to suit the re-
quirements of the services they wish
to launch.
Hashim added: “Using the platform
and its available pre-designed apps
by government entities will facilitate
connecting these apps in the future
in order to launch them through
one single smart portal benefit
-
ing from their unified specifications
and design standards being on one
platform. The platform will also con-
tribute to increasing reliability and
security and saving users time and
efforts”.
Meanwhile, Qais Gharaibeh, Man-
aging Director, SAP UAE, said: “the
platform we are working with Etisalat
to create will offer sample software
and solutions for smart apps that cor-
respond to the needs of around 1700
government entities in the country
who are seeking to transform into
smart government”.
A public platform for
easy design and opera
-
tion of service apps
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