E-govt program earns global accolades

A workshop entitled "World Summit on Information Society" held in Geneva appreciated the Kingdom's e-government program “Yesser”. A presentation about Yesser and its achievements in implementing e-government practices was held at the Geneva summit. The International Telecommunication Union recently organized the summit, said Ali bin Saleh Al-Soma, Yesser's director general.
Al-Soma said the Yesser program and top-notch professionals associated with it represented the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology at the Geneva meeting. Governor of Communication and Information Technology Commission Abdullah Al-Dharrab, who is the chief of the Kingdom's National Committee for Information Society, led the delegation.
Al-Soma said that the presentation focused on e-government in Saudi Arabia, achievements and future. "This e-government initiative has been largely supported by the Kingdom’s leadership, which is committed to use modern technology to make the lives of people easy, happier and prosperous," said Al-Soma.
He summarized what government agencies have achieved in shifting to e-government and shed light on the important projects and shared initiatives that have gone a long way in implementing the Yesser program. He also spoke about the infrastructure projects, which were presented at the Geneva summit, such as the national e-government portal “Saudi”, Government Secure Network “GSN” and Government Service Bus “GSB”.
Referring to the rapid progress the Kingdom has made in this field, Mustafa Khan, manager of Yesser’s Center of Excellence for Research and Development, said that the Kingdom’s progress was very substantial. He made a presentation about change management projects that supported shifting to e-government. He pointed out that intensive training programs were being offered to employees of different government agencies.
Khan said: "The employees are being trained to make them well-skilled and well-equipped with technical know-how to handle the e-government programs."
The Kingdom won two awards from the United Nations in the area of communications and information technology and government's e-services. The prizes were awarded to the Ministry of Education for its system “Nour”, and the Human Resources Development Fund for its program “Hafiz”. The prestigious achievements of the two Saudi organizations reflect the achievements of Saudi Arabia in the fields of e-services and shifting to e-government.
For the first time, the ITU launched these awards for which more than 170 agencies representing 50 countries applied. The workshop in Geneva was attended by a number of employees of the Saudi consulate in Geneva and the Saudi delegation to the United Nations in addition to members of a number of UN organizations.
The Kingdom's Yesser program is a major government initiative to raise public sectors' productivity and efficiency. The program aims to provide better and more easy-to-use services for individual and business customers. Yesser reduces, as much as possible, centralization in e-government implementation, while ensuring a minimum level of coordination between government departments.