Category: Improving Transparency, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Public Service Project: National egovernment Portal, Bahrain.bh Institution: egovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain Summary In order to improve the government service delivery to citizens and taking into account of utilizing the best in class infrastructure and high e-literacy rate of Bahrain, the kingdom launched the egovernment Strategy for Bahrain. The strategic vision of the egovernment programme is Deliver Customer value through Collaborative Government. The egovernment Strategy emphasized on providing government services to the customers (citizens, residents, businesses and visitors) through the 4 service delivery channels National egovernment Portal (www.bahrain.bh), Mobile Portal, National Contact Centre and Common Service Centres & Kiosks. The egovernment Portal is the key linkage between the other three delivery channels since the aim of egovernment is to ensure customer convenience through electronic delivery of all government services. Also, the portal acts as the integration point for all government services. The Kingdom is implementing around 200 eservices spread across 30 ministries to the customers through the National egovernment Portal. The National Portal addresses the issues related to government service delivery in the areas of transparency of government operations, responsiveness of the government processes and accountability of government officials. The key objectives of the National Portal include citizen convenience through anytime, anywhere and anyone access to integrated government services. The Kingdom adopted a multi-pronged strategy to implement the National Portal service oriented architecture principles, optimized sourcing strategy, robust infrastructure, adoption of industry standards, addressing citizen s security concerns, empowering citizens through eparticipation, etc. The success of this initiative can primarily be attributed to clear political mandate & buy-in from country s top leadership, a strategy that clearly addressed the citizen s needs & listened to them, and well defined and focused program and project governance framework. The Problem The major issues related to the public service delivery are bureaucratic hurdles, inefficient processes, outdated policies, inability of the existing government mechanism to handle the ever increasing demand for the public services. At the same time, Bahrain has one of the best ICT infrastructures amongst the countries in Middle East. It has a Government wide Data network connecting ministries, one of the highest personal computer penetration in the Arab world, highest mobile and internet penetration, advanced telecommunication infrastructure, and high literacy rate. Even though each ministry had undertaken some
initiatives on their own, a full-fledged and integrated service delivery mechanism for people was not in force. With this backdrop, the Kingdom decided to leverage its ICT strength to solve the issues in improving the public service delivery. The following were the key issues identified: Transparency Issues Accountability Issues Responsiveness Issues Limited information regarding service request status Lack of online availability of latest government information Limited channels available for interaction with citizens Lack of information on SLA /service turn-around time and government employees attached to a service/ request Lack of awareness regarding grievance redress procedures Lack of a one-stop-shop service for citizens to access govt. services Manual processes led to bureaucratic hurdles Inefficient Processes at ministries meant they were unable to handle increasing volumes The Solution Bahrain recognized the importance and the need for collaborative and innovative ways of delivering Government services to make life easier. This is the philosophy behind Bahrain s egovernment, which is more than a technology, it is a tool that is easily accessible and for the benefit of everyone in the Kingdom and beyond. In order to improve the government service delivery to citizens and taking into account of utilizing the best in class infrastructure and high e-literacy rate of Bahrain, the kingdom launched the egovernment Strategy for Bahrain. The strategy emphasized on providing government services to the customers (citizens, residents, businesses and visitors) through the 4 service delivery channels National egovernment Portal (www.bahrain.bh), Mobile Portal, National Contact Centre and Common Service Centres & Kiosks. The strategic vision of this programme is Deliver Customer value through Collaborative Government. As a part of this programme, the Kingdom is implementing around 200 eservices spread across 30 ministries to the customers through the National egovernment Portal. One of the key service delivery channels for the Kingdom is the National Portal. The National egovernment Portal is a one stop shop Portal and is the primary service delivery channel that integrates and provides all types of services informational, transactional and online payment. The National Portal was launched on 23rd, May, 2007, and is being managed by the egovernment Authority (ega). The National Portal is available in Arabic and English languages.
The following are the key objectives of the National egovernment Portal: Citizen Convenience Integrated, Best in Class Benefits to state Provide time and cost benefits to citizens who need not travel to govt. offices to avail services Provide cross-ministry, integrated services to ensure minimal lags and bureaucracy delays Achieve Resource and administrative cost efficiencies and optimum utilization of resources through better allocation. Channels of Choice Provide citizens with an alternate channel to access government services- National portal, Mobile portal Anytime, Anywhere, Anyone access Provide citizens with 24x7 access to government services without geography restrictions On 3rd, November, 2008, the portal address was changed from www.e.gov.bh to www.bahrain.bh to an easier address based on the results of a customer survey study which revealed the difficulty of memorizing the old address. As on date, egovernment Portal provides more than 150 eservices online including vital services with payment features such as Pay electricity and water bill and Pay Traffic Contraventions. The National Portal has an attractive design with a clear navigational menu which represents the various customer segments - Individuals, Businesses, Government and Visitors, each tab are given a unique color and when clicking on each tab the user will get the contents (eservices and Informational) related to that particular tab. The National Portal is 100% compatible with Internet Explorer 6.0 & above, and mostly compatible with Firefox, Netscape, Opera and other major web browsers. This growing popularity is evident from the statistics of the viewership of the portal on various parameters i.e page views 8,845,127; 1,241,577 visits; 3340 visits/day; Visits from more than 180 countries; with 38 % new visitors, in the last one year. The customer s confidence and trust on the National Portal enabled transaction security is evident from the statistics of financial transactions (online payment) done since its creation - Over USD 33 million worth transactions. National Portal provides the platform to engage customers in the government decision making process. National Portal provides multiple tools such as egovernment Blog, Online Polls, Feedback Form to consult with the customers. A comprehensive policy on econsultation is available for the general public on the Portal (refer Your Opinion Matters section). One of the latest topics solicited public opinion regarding the development of a new egovernment Strategy 2011-2014 for Bahrain. In order to promote accountability, responsiveness and transparency, National Portal has published its commitment to its customers through the Customer Charter. This Charter promises the Portal s service levels, grievance redressal mechanism, etc. The Customer Charter is the first and one of the unique initiatives among the Gulf countries.
The Portal features more than 150 eservices, and most of the services are end-to-end, connecting different ministries and have been developed after thorough BPR. E.g. Issuance of Birth Certificate the eligible user needs to apply and pay online for issuance of a birth certificate for a new born. The system integrates the hospitals with Ministry of Health, Central Informatics Organization (CIO) to generate unique national id for the new born, egovernment for online payment gateway and Department of Posts to dispatch the birth certificate. The Kingdom of Bahrain has adopted a multi-pronged strategy to implement the National Portal. It started with private participation and then later government took upon itself to upgrade and maintain the National Portal. As on date, egovernment Authority is managing the National Portal (development of the Services on the Portal, coordinating with Ministries for service integration, managing & creating contents for the Portal, ensuring compliance to leading industry standards, etc.). The services development on the Portal is undertaken by the Services Delivery Directorate in ega consisting of more 10 developers and approx another 30 technical and managerial resources available onsite from the outsourced vendors. The government s technology arm Central Informatics Organization (CIO) provides the hosting services and the system administration services for the deployed National Portal infrastructure. The following are the key implementation highlights: SOA Approach Service Oriented Architecture Principles were adopted to ensure reusability & speedy deployment of services. Optimized Strategy Sourcing A mix of sourcing strategies adopted to provide access to best-in-breed resources Outsourcing also provided the flexibility in resource management Outsourced initiatives completely managed by ega Robust Infrastructure IT Infrastructure hosting the National Portal was revamped and state-of-the-art systems deployed Infrastructure designed for high availability and optimum performance during peak load times Managed by in-house resources of ega and CIO Standards Adopted Standards defined for Style sheets (Color schemes, layouts, fonts and styles); Coding Standards defined. Dedicated QA team to define and maintain the Standards; also ensure compliance to Standards Accessibility Adopted W3C accessibility standards - continued efforts to ensure compliance to these standards Appropriate language and look-feel features (e.g. Zoom in-out) are built-in to ensure all-round inclusiveness Security Implemented McAfee for daily security testing of the Portal SSL Certification from VeriSign to ensure security of
online transactions including online payments. Overall security assurance through dedicated Security team. eparticipation Defined eparticipation Policy for the National Portal Portal includes active eparticpation features and has implemented Web 2.0 tools like Blogs, Online Survey Polls, etc. Blogs available from senior leadership Dedicated Teams Simplification and improvement of Business Processes (BPR Team) Dedicated Service Development Managers responsible for enabling eservices on Service Delivery Channels Focused content development & management team QA team to ensure quality and usability of eservices Marketing & Awareness team propagating information and promoting usage of eservices Capacity Building team educating citizens on basic computer skills and using of eservices The following are the key benefits realized: Increased Transparency Higher Accountability Greater Responsiveness Online availability of latest government information like budgets, policies, government directory, survey reports, etc. eparticipation tools facilitating 2-way government-citizen interaction Online availability of service request status Customer Charters and SLAs have been published online, thus putting the onus of performance on government Online feedback / complaint through National Portal provides citizens with a medium to raise their grievances Online discussion forums / blogs on National Portal, Community pages on Facebook has led to enhanced responsiveness from govt. officials Reduced service turn-around time due to automation Common practices and standards has reduced timeline for enablement of eservices Other 24x7 availability of government services Single window access to a wide array of government services (150+) Secured & Scalable infrastructure hosting the Portal Common Platform for customers and government to interact with each other. Gives government the ability to track service usage trends The key elements that made this initiative a success are the following: Have clear political mandate and buy in from the country s top leadership Have a Strategy that clearly addresses the citizens needs & listens to them
Align Ministry goals to the country s egovernment Strategy Ensure digital inclusiveness for all by establishing CSCs and Kiosks across the Kingdom Well defined program governance framework SCICT, ega, Ministry level working groups, etc. Continuous review / addition of services to ensure all the important services are available online to citizens Focused project governance through Service Delivery & Channels, BPR, QA and PMO teams Establish common standards, policies and guidelines across all Ministries and implement common polices and standards for ICT initiatives through the implementation of Kingdom-wide Enterprise Architecture to enable service integration and interoperability Optimized sourcing strategies to get best-in-class domain experts and technology solutions on-board Focus Groups formed consisting of external stakeholders (industry, government officials, academicians, citizens, etc) to review the usability and accessibility of the National Portal. These reviews are analyzed by the ega team and implement the suggestions Importance to Marketing and Awareness of egovernment initiatives Conduct bi-annual citizen survey to assess the satisfaction levels and scope for further improvements. Motivate teams by appreciating their dedicated efforts & good work