Lootah directs DM leadership to achieve "Zero Visit Municipality"

Eng. Hussein Nasser Lootah, Director General of Dubai Municipality directed Municipality's leadership to execute and deliver e-government projects during the coming period so as to achieve the civic body's objective of "Zero Visit Municipality."

This came during a meeting with the higher leadership of the Municipality, which is organized on a regular basis to interact with them and search ways for simplifying procedures and reviewing the obstacles to work and exchanging views and observations with regard to development of work in the Municipality.

Lootah called upon the leaders to simplify procedures and provide services and complete the work within the specified time and in accordance with the objectives and plans formulated by the Municipality for its projects.

Lootah focused on the timely implementation of e-government projects by utilizing the possibilities provided by the Government of Dubai such as the strong e-government infrastructure, and the setting of objectives and applications that meet the Municipality's vision and its goal to achieve completion of transactions with Zero Visit during 2011.

During the meeting, Municipality's different sectors and its leaders presented performance indicators for the departments of the Municipality, which came under discussion and observations were also presented in regard.

Lootah called upon the leaders for the need to have direct interaction, cooperation and excellence in the provision of services in order to achieve the strategic objectives of the Municipality linked on a direct way with the strategic objectives which the city seeks to achieve.

"It should be recalled that Dubai Municipality has achieved more than 6 million e-transactions over the past year," said, adding that the Municipality has achieved this success in record time since the launch of the first bouquet of e-services in October 2001.

The Municipality has been able to accomplish within the scheduled time all the plans and instructions required of them by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice-President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, as recently the Municipality started providing 100% of its services electronically.

The increased growth index confirms the acceptance of e-services of the civic body by customers from various segments of the public and establishments. The Municipality portal has recorded an average of more than 47,000 transactions in a week. This service allows customers to complete and follow-up procedures related to the payment of bills for municipal services through innovative electronic channels.

This demonstrates the rapid pace of adoption of the Municipality customers the method of e-transactions as an alternative to manual paper-based transactions. When it took 18 months (from October 2001 to April 2003) to reach the figure to 100,000 transactions a month, this number doubled to 200,000 in less than five months.

This jump is attributed partly to the increase in the number of e-services available through the portal as the number increased from about 15 services in October 2001 to 488 services in 2010. However, the most important factor is the increase in the total number of transactions as in the case of some services the ratio was increased to 100%.

Dubai Municipality is considered one of the largest local departments in terms of services provided by it. In addition, the expanded number of categories of users of its e-services is an indication of widening the circle of users of e-government services. There has been tremendous response to utilize the advantages of e-government.

Dubai Municipality has taken it upon itself to continue to attract and harness the latest systems and methods in the world in all fields supervised by it. This system will be popularized on all other services provided by Dubai Municipality.

E-government was a dream and it became a reality and is being tasted by all the customers of local departments in Dubai and it is in implementation of the directives of the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, which has become an approach that the departments compete among themselves to achieve. It is beneficial to the customer and is reflected thereby on facilitating transactions and reducing the procedures.

Lootah urged users of the portal to turn to complete their transactions electronically and adopt modern methods to the benefit of the completion of the work from anywhere, at any time and without having to visit the office and suffering from the heavy traffic on the streets and the difficulties for finding parking around the Municipality building.

The rate of e-transactions have been varied as per the nature of the tasks provided by the departments as completed transactions are distributed in several areas such as issuing certificates of Dubai Central Laboratory of different categories, certificates of medical and veterinary clinics, hygiene certificates for food, NOCs and building demarcation certificates, and other services that amount to a total of 488. Public can access these services and complete the transactions provided by the Municipality through its website www.dm.gov.ae without the need for personally going to its offices.

Dubai Municipality endeavours to use latest applications that go along with the development in the electronic field and provides support to e-services. In this respect, the technical staff in the Municipality continuously work to launch new services and transform the conventional procedures to electronic procedures in coordination and cooperation with the concerned organizational units in the Municipality. In parallel, there are training programmes for customers carried out by the Municipality as the Information Technology Department plays a big role in the activation of e-government in the civic body.

The Municipality portal currently offers 488 e-services registered in the Directory of Services, which provides easy access to multiple forms required to obtain Dubai Municipality services. The portal conducts 6,790,000 e-transactions with an average of 47,000 transactions every week, which is an increase of 98% of the total number of transactions made. The value of e-payment transactions amounted to 1,067, 907 and the total number of companies registered are 20,678 and there are 74,033 representative for these companies, while the total number of individuals registered with the "public" has reached 27,543, while there 26 websites for Municipality.