DM's E-government initiative examined at Map Middle East
He was speaking at the Plenary Session of the Map Middle East 2006, on the third day of the conference, which will conclude on Wednesday. In his paper on Dubai Municipality's E-government," Lootah said the Municipality has so far achieved more than 1.6 million online transactions and collected over Dhs14 million through e-payments. "We now offer 381 Online Services and we have over 17,000 registered business users," he said. Talking about the achievements so far, Lootah said the Municipality has re-engineered, developed and deployed the bilingual DM portal, which has a directory of services providing useful information on 50 services. He said the portal offers 93 informational services and 238 transactional services with an average of 17,000 transactions per week. "DM portal offers engineering services for contractors and contractors, laboratory testing services, services for food traders and food handlers, public services such as parking fines payment, etc. It has a secure online registration service, online payment facility through credit cards and e-Dirham Card. Besides the portal has also introduced email and SMS as customer communication channels and launched free e-Service Training programme for external customers," said Lootah. He said Dubai Municipality believes in giving quick and easy access to accurate information 24X7 to all its customers. "Efficient resolution of complaints and faster processing of the transactions with the government have been the first step to improving customer services," said Lootah, adding that customer service has always been a priority with Dubai Municipality. He said Dubai e-Governance has adopted a four step implementation approach involving Strategy, Process, People and Technology, thus sustaining a model for e-government in the years to come by revamping the setup with new strategies and new upcoming geospatial technologies. Lootah said the ongoing projects include provision of online planning permits, building permits and environmental approvals for industrial projects, waste management services and many more. The second paper of the day called 'Technology for a more secure world' was presented by Preetha Pulusani, President of the SG&I Division of Intergraph Corporation, USA. She said security applications used to prevent crises today are much more than traditional GIS and provide a more comprehensive, information-rich geospatial environment that are bringing together emergency and incident management with sensor, alarm and video surveillance technologies to provide a complete COP. "Increasing security concerns from manmade and natural disasters throughout the world continue to pose challenges to predict, prepare, respond and recover from these events. Today, a system has to be responsive and adaptable and further be able to anticipate intelligent adversaries," said Pulusani. She said in a crisis situation, responders must have an entire overview, a Common Operating Picture (COP), to access and respond quickly to an emergency. The third day's third paper called "Land Management and Cadastre" was presented by Gottfried Konecny, Emeritus Professor with the University of Hannover, Germany. In his paper Konecny said that in many parts of the World land, which is a limited, non renewable resource, is overutilized and degraded by urbanization and industrialization. "The prerequisite to land management is to create legal security for occupation of land, and to create investment opportunities under legal rights. This is an economic incentive permitting urban and rural land reforms, as endorsed by the UNCED process," he said. "The first task is to create a legal basis for the different legal types of land (state owned, private, communal and open access). Based upon the created laws the technical solution is the establishment of a cadastral system, in which the current rights are geolocated, described and continuously maintained," said Konecny. Styli Camateros, Vice President, Bentley Geospatial presented the fourth paper of the day called, "Advancing Geospatial Technology in Infrastructure." He said infrastructure is the cornerstone of economic development and because of its long lifecycle is particularly difficult to manage. "Current use of Geospatial technology in Infrastructure falls short in critical areas such as precision, 3D, integration of planning, analysis, design, and facilities management, and integration of data required for lifecycle management of the asset but that is not conducive to being stored in a database," said Camateros. He said concepts such as Federated Data Management will be explored as avenues to advance GIS for infrastructure. Eng. Muhamad Al Rajhi, General Director of Surveying and Mapping Directorate, Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who delivered his speech in the keynote session on GIS in the Middle East, talked about Geo information in Saudi Arabia. In the same session, Brigadier Khalifa Al Romaithi, Director of Military Survey Department, UAE, gave a brief idea about the Abu Dhabi Emirate Geoportal (GeoADE).
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