Visa via app soon, thanks to Royal Oman Police

Energy Sunday 06/January/2019 21:35 PM
By: Times News Service
Visa via app soon, thanks to Royal Oman Police

Muscat: Visa services could soon be available via the Royal Oman Police (ROP) app, according to a senior officer.
Speaking exclusively to the Times of Oman and TFM on the occasion of ROP Day, Captain Ibrahim Saif Al Kindi, team leader of the smart application services at the ROP’s IT department, said his team was working on updating the app so that more services will be available in the future.
“The latest update we have in our mobile application, we are trying to provide some services that are being used a lot, and they sometimes have to visit the ROP centres to accomplish it.
“Now, we have traffic services, very soon you will have customs services in the mobile applications, and we will have visa services, visa status and all these kinds of things.
“Every day is a challenge, and from the beginning, we need to think about what we need to do, and after we do it, we need to think about how we can support it, because supporting the IT service is very important,” added Al Kindi.
“You can’t just publish something and forget about it. You need to have proper support; you need to have proper testing. We are also conducting user experience tests, so that we know how people feel about our products once we publish them, after they have used them for a while.”
Electronic visa
Major Hussain Ali Al Jabri, head of training, ROP customs, added, “After a survey with all the users we found that we have a 90 per cent customer satisfaction. We are looking forward for further satisfaction to reach 99 per cent. Now we will also get the electronic visa on the app, and people won’t need to go to our offices any more, just maybe for further details, if we ask them to do so.”
ROP Day was marked yesterday and was used to honour the uniformed men and women who tirelessly work and maintain a constant vigil to help Omani citizens, as well as foreign nationals in the country.
“This is actually a very special police force we have in the country, because we have 59 departments, and in total, we have about 70,000 officers,” said Al Jabri.
“Professionally, this has added a lot to my skills and knowledge, in terms of how to train people and how to address their skills and needs. It’s taught me how to serve our country from the customers’ point of view. I need to prepare everything in advance to satisfy our customers, and prepare my officers so that they can be properly satisfied.
Graduation
“The stressful part of the job would be on the administrative side, and the fun part is the satisfaction you get after graduation, and knowing that the service you do is going to benefit someone,” added Al Jabri, who has been serving with the ROP for more than 10 years.
“All the departments of the ROP have headquarters in every governorate in Oman, and there is also a directorate. We have 21 directorates only to serve ROP and customers with services that are both electronic and otherwise. Each department has one speciality.”
Al Kindi also added that the ROP would always seek to continue developing their services to bring maximum benefit to the country.
“In the IT department, for example, the IT systems were set up in the 1980s, and since then, we have been regularly upgrading our systems to enable us to achieve as much as we can. We received His Majesty’s award for the best mobile application in the government, and the best integrated system for customs.
“It’s not just the service that matters, but the planning of the service. One of the reasons we got the award is because we conducted feasibility, engineering surveys to understand exactly what the users needed and worked according to that.
“These reviews are real reviews, and they are very important to us, because people appreciate that the ROP are developing things to help them and they say it is good, but we need to know the details. We need to know the pros and cons of everything we do,” added Al Kindi.
This year, ROP Day was celebrated with the graduation of more than 1,500 officers who will join the police force.
Al Kindi added, “The last 10 years have been a big challenge, because in IT, there is something new every day. One of the hardest challenges is to please users, especially when they expect something from the government. We have various kinds of users because our services are delivered to different types of customers.”