HE Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed bin Saqar Al Nehayan, chairman of the Bin Zayed Group, delivered the e-Government conference’s keynote address.

His Excellency said that as more and more business embraced Internet technology and moved into e-commerce, it was important for government departments to follow suit or get left behind. In an economy where products and services are available at the click of the button, he stressed it was necessary to provide government services on-line as well.

Bringing these services on-line would save time, increase efficiency and reduce costs, all of which would be attractive to international investors. However, certain requirements needed to be in place before e-government could work, emphasized Sheikh Khaled.

For example, employees need to be retrained for new jobs and infrastructure needed to be put in place. The monopoly of Internet Services Providers (ISP’s) must be broken and more entrants to the field encouraged by the government to generate healthy competition, he said.

“E-governance is an important market strategy for governments today. The inclination of governments has been put up a Web site for every department, each with a separate URL, offering its own department information and on-line services.

Alternatively, government departments could create one central Web site, from which an individual could then link to any department. Either approach has the same effect as the customer needs prior knowledge of which department to go to for what service,” he added.

According to Sheikh Khaled, the best practice would be to aggregate services across departments and make them accessible through a common portal. The design of the portal may take into account criteria such as volume of transactions, nature of the service, identification, staff or seasonal bottlenecks, re-engineering, public policy issues, whether the service is on-line or departmental Web site and cost of providing the service.