Dubai Municipality makes 27 services faster and more secure

Dubai: The Dubai Municipality has partnered with IBM to overhaul its online service infrastructure in a bid to make e-government services faster, more efficient, reliable and more secure.

Twenty-seven of the 520 online services provided by the municipality were moved to the new architecture, which provides more reliable access points and heightened security when users perform online e-government transactions, said Abdullah Al Shaibani, assistant director general of the Dubai Municipality.

"When our online services were enabled we were led to another challenge, we needed to improve reliability, better services, therefore we looked into reorganising the infrastructure to accommodate the vast number of customers accessing the services," he said on Monday.

Conversion

"The project was a major undertaking that required us to streamline disparate operations from the analogue world into one system in the digital world."

The municipality's director of information technology, Abdul Hakim Malek said all 520 services would undergo the conversion within the next two years.

The Next Generation Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) would deliver more reliable access points, delivering 100 per cent accessibility and the response time of the new architecture was 2.4 seconds against the planned response time of 4 seconds.

Malek added that the municipality's "back-end" services, used largely by the staff, would also be moved to the new infrastructure.

Senior vice-president and IBM group executive for software, Steve Mills, said the infrastructure improved the end-user or customer's experience of the service.