Dubai eGovernment has won top honours in the ‘Enterprise Services-Business to Customer’ category at the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Executive Forum Vision Awards 2006 that were announced yesterday at Al Murooj Rotana Hotel in Dubai. The awards were instituted by CPI (Corporate Publishing International), one of the Middle East’s leading IT publishing house and was presented in association with Dubai Quality Group and Experton.
The ‘Enterprise Services-Business to Customer (B2C)’ award is presented to the organisation that is determined to provide the most comprehensive set of services to customers. The organisation should have demonstrated that they have developed initiatives that assure greater access to business services and an independent use of IT to access the services. The program or service must demonstrate reliability, dependability, confidentiality and security, and should be available on a 24/7 basis.
Commenting on the award, Fadi Hindi, Acting IT Manager, Dubai eGovernment, said, “We are extremely honoured to receive such an award. Dubai eGovernment has been constantly striving to help Dubai’s transformation to a digital economy. We believe our focus on business and technology to integrate the government departments is truly an enabler of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed’s vision for Dubai eGovernment.”
During the event, awards were also presented in the Enterprise Services-Innovation category and the Enterprise Services-Architecture category. Out of the applications received, only those from companies with an SOA vision were selected for the awards evaluation. The finalists in all categories were evaluated on the basis of the clarity, quality and completeness of information presented. Criterion such as roadmap, challenge, solution, number of services provided, Oasis Reference Model Compliance, strategic architectural solutions, of implementation and compliance with web services were applied to each response.
The awards were based on a survey conducted with over 300 CIOs and IT Managers throughout the GCC. The nominations for the awards were filtered down to 16 top applications for the final evaluation process. These applications represented companies from across the GCC region particularly the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait.
Dubai eGovernment is a pioneering initiative in the region to provide online services across the spectrum of corporate and community life in the emirate. It also has a vision to integrateindividually automated government departments under the single umbrella of the eGovernment initiative, thus empowering employees across lines of businesses and levels of government, besides facilitating the lives of citizens and customers of the government. Dubai has taken a lead in the region in deploying eGovernment applications and is among the first few governments in the world to provide such integrated services to its citizens. The eGovernment portal (www.dubai.ae) is a single contact point masking the complexity of the bureaucratic procedures, and guiding access to all services in the easiest possible way. In addition, the eGovernment initiative seeks to improve and enhance procedures by maximizing the benefit from technology, so that users from all walks of life will be able to utilize the portal for their specific needs with considerable ease.
