According to Abdullah Al Shaibani, Assistant Director General of Dubai Municipality for Technical Services, the civic body’s pavilion at the exhibition is attracting a lot of visitors who are also offered training on how to benefit from the e-Services. He noted that the Municipality’s stall, which is part of the huge Dubai e-Government pavilion, has two sections. The first section promotes e-Services provided by the Municipality, and the second section gives information about the interactive maps developed by the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Centre, which help people locate any facility in Dubai and create a location map for the same. Al Shaibani said Dubai Municipality’s e-Government initiative is poised to achieve 90 percent electronic transition by 2007. The DM portal now offers some 354 online services.
“What we aim through our participation in Gitex is to make people aware of the e-Services provided by Dubai Municipality. This is a vital issue because we would like to encourage the maximum number of our customers to complete their transactions online rather than coming to the municipal offices,” Al Shaibani said. The section for GIS features Dubai Municipality’s GIS database integration with other government departments. Visitors are also shown how interactive maps, produced by the GIS centre, help them find locations and facilities in the city.
This section is also getting a good response from visitors as far as from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, who wanted to know the methods of accessing interactive maps. Since the launch of Dubai Municipality’s portal in October 2001, a total of 3.2 million online transactions have been registered so far. The portal offers nearly 70 online transactional services. Besides, a Directory of Services on the portal provides information about more than 280 services of the municipality.
