Digital growth essential for all government bodies

Muscat: The Information Technology Authority (ITA), in collaboration with the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, and Ministry of Civil Service, conducted the Government eServices excellence workshop on Tuesday at Oman Convention and Exhibition Center (OCEC).
The opening ceremony of the workshop was held under the patronage of Minister of Civil Service, Sheikh Khalid bin Omar Al Marhoon, who affirmed that simplification of procedures and facilitation of services is the subject of the hour and that His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said has directed the government sector to facilitate procedures.
The workshop aimed to gather more than 80 government entities under one roof to shed light on the services documentation, processes reengineering, and service automation.
The workshop seeks to coordinate the efforts between the government entities to achieve the national objectives of the digital transformation plan, discuss the mechanisms and modern methods to optimise the services, display the detailed stages of costumer journey, and keeping up with the execution of direction of the Council of Ministers regarding documenting the government services.
Sayyid Salim bin Musalam Al Busaidi, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Civil Service, gave a speech in which he highlighted that there are 2,584 government services. As many as 66 entities completed their service catalogue; while 14 entities did not and 50 entities uploaded their catalogue in their websites; while 30 did not.
He added, “We believe that this workshop will motivate the entities that didn’t complete the services catalogue and documentation and those who are behind in the process reengineering and automation phases to move faster and deliver high quality services.”
Dr Salim bin Sultan Al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA, encouraged government entities’ representatives to work hard to keep pace with the continuously evolving digital trends.
He said, “Creativity and innovation in our projects is a mandate in the era of the industry 4.0 technologies. This won’t be achieved without collaborative efforts from all parties and digital transformation teams in the government entities are responsible for implementing their transformation plan in all its phases.”
Al Ruzaiqi announced a new initiative from the ITA called government innovate that aims to enhance government performance and services delivery through utilisation of emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain and others. The details of the initiative will be revealed in the next digital transformation teams meeting in April.
The ITA is keen on improving the services, facilitating and documenting the procedures in order to increase the efficiency of the entity’s work, better serve the costumer and measure the effectiveness of the methodology in hand.
Through this event, the ITA aims to establish a number of values such as reinforcing the culture of creativity in providing eServices, providing equal opportunities for all society segments to get high quality services, moving forward quickly in facilitating the procedures and reengineering the processes.