From E-Government to Good Governance and from Good Governance to Development... The Arab world in the global E-Government readiness report 2005 Arab E-government

Charting a new path

“One thing that makes MOSD a special case is that Her Excellency the Minister is an IT oriented person. This feature especially gives the IT department a strong and continuous support,” says Al-Mandeel.

Going forward, MOSD’s technology driven roadmap build out will be dominated by three major areas of investment – networking infrastructure, building an identity driven architecture and investing in open source applications from the backend right to the desktop.

In order to set the ball rolling, the ministry has also formed an alliance with Novell to help it build a flexible, scalable and secure environment. Using Open Source has also become a mainstay of operations for the team.

Getting networked

But as it goes with all new ventures, MOSD also has to face up to its challenges. “One of the major challenges we need to overcome lies in successfully building our own separate LAN and WAN network that will connect us with 20 remote sites and to the government data network. So technologies that we use and alliances we strike will play a critical role,” she adds.

Currently using the Ministry of Labour's network for its infrastructure needs, MOSD is preparing to go independent in a number of areas - including infrastructure requirements. Investments planned on this front are expected to lead MOSD within the next five years, to become an e-Ministry and part of the Bahrain e-Government with paperless transactions, providing on-line information and services to other organisations and citizens.

“The Bahraini government is moving towards providing full services using the Internet as part of the e-government project. Our efforts are aimed at making our Ministry one of the fastest ones to launch our services over the next two years,” she adds.

Following the infrastructure roll out, the MOSD’s 600 employees will be servicing a wide variety of citizens and groups through its remote sites that will be connected through the LAN & WAN and the MOSD portal.

Going open

MOSD’s commitment to Open Source is yet another important facet of the region’s strong commitment to standards. According to Al Mandeel, the initiatives like the one at MOSD are expected to change the map of IT usage in Bahrain over the next 10 years.

“Open source systems and models that have been adopted at the government sites have proved to be a stable and secure option. Besides which, they have also enabled an environment that can easily be integrated, scalable and built using available technology that is in the market in a number of flavours,” she adds.

This ministry in particular is leading the way with Open Source standardization, which includes a migration to Suse Linux on the desktop. Following the completion of its backend phase, the IT department plans to begin its desktop migration by 2007. But the ROI is estimated to still be sometime away.

“For us at MOSD the main benefit from phase 1 has been the ability to break free from proprietary products. Now we can go Linux or windows, because the infrastructure is flexible enough to handle both. With such an environment, we believe that we have become stronger simply because we have the options and the strength to choose things that we had never had before,” Al-Mandeel remarks.

Linux has also made its way into the project at all levels starting from the LAN which uses Suze Linux integrated with Novell products. This project also makes MOSD the first ministry to deploy end-to-end Linux on the Novell platform.

Stacking it all up

Seamless integration and a business-oriented workflow is a pillar to the success of MOSD. In order to ensure this objective, the technology initiative is focused on enabling systems, process and business integration that are secure and identity driven.

“Systems integration between MOSD and other government entities will be a key factor toward the e-MOSD especially to enable proper electronic work flow and facilitate the services provided to citizens. In the first half of this year we focused on investing in preparing our infrastructure to function as the backbone of all MOSD systems to be developed later,” Al-Mandeel says.

With the centralisation of network and management, MOSD also wanted to invest in power tools for network managers that will enable them to do more with less.

“Right now we have only nine people, which poses a challenge by itself given the size of the ministry and the amount of work we have to deliver on. By centralising the management and giving more powerful tools to our network administrators, we hope that we would minimise the effort required and also the downtime for the end-user and facilitate faster troubleshooting services,” she adds.

The identity driven approach also fits nicely into this piece. “We believe that identity management tools would automate a lot of services, secure transaction within the ministry infrastructure and help building user friendly systems. With the remote sites in place, the need is to keep track of security on desktops, ensure proper IT maintenance service, desktop management and automated services, especially with the constraint of limited IT staff at hand,” Al-Mandeel shares.

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