TEXPO

Portal Management Guidelines & Policies for Dubai Municipality

Given the highly competitive environment, Dubai Municipality (DM) required a robust web strategy that would facilitate internal DM senior management, technical staff and other stakeholders to make effective use of eGovernment Portals besides their internal and external websites.  TEXPO was selected to work closely with the department to put together a comprehensive eGovernment Portal Management Guidelines and Policies Manual that would set the stage for achieving business objectives.

The business drivers:

At Dubai Municipality, the eGovernment department has been managing its eGovernment Portal that began as a small initiative to provide information and services to its customers. However, with new services being launched and the expansion of DM itself, this initiative grew to support approximately 30 sub-websites from various departments within DM. It became critical therefore to put a strategy in place to manage this requirement.TEXPO was roped in to help develop and maintain a valuable and cost effective in house tool for DM that would support daily processes by improving efficiency and increasing both - the staff and customer satisfaction.

“These guidelines were required to be designed after identifying the staff and specific organisational needs. They were mandated to outline the practices that should be adopted in the intranet governance model and were aimed at establishing the criteria for choosing an authoring model suitable for DM,” said Dr Sarfaraz Alam, CEO, TEXPO.

Based on this plan, a list of best practices was drawn up to help DM maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of its internal processes and ultimately the services it provides.

These practices looked at the following areas:

• Structure of the Intranet
• Intranet Accessibility Standards
• Compatible Content Management System
• Integration with the organizational systems
• Intranet management team
• User Access levels

From this, twelve policies were derived to be implemented and TEXPO, as the selected partner organised the requirements into a set of ten policies and guidelines, with the deliverables structured in distinct groups for mandatory practices followed by additional steps and best practices. Evaluation checklists were also developed to accompany these deliverables to facilitate the staff involved in the implementation of these policies and guidelines.

“TEXPO recognised that DM operates in a highly competitive business environment which meant that any recommendations given will need to also meet the future growth requirements of the business,” said Dr Alam.

Drawing up the plan:

The overall objective of the exercise was to enable DM to reach out to citizens and maintain strong relationships with them. In order to achieve this, the strategy needs to cater to the following business objectives:

• The marketing policies for the portals will categorically define how to synthesize an interactive process that focuses on the use of modern marketing techniques to provide value added services to citizens via portals
• The policy will address the issue of developing the right online services for the portal using market research
• Establish support and accessibility issues for the portal to make sure citizens can access the portal when they need it and where they want to access it
• The role of portal in the provision of value addition in terms of time and effort required to access the Dubai Municipality services will be defined
• Inform users on the availability of services on the portals and how to encourage them to use it
• To ensure that DM achieves the goals and performance benchmarks that it sets for itself, and is able to consistently meet the public expectations over the years

Like any other large organisation, DM also faced issues in the standardization of service processes, practices and workflows to deal with the on-going expansion of the portal. “The absence of well-defined policies, procedures and guidelines makes it almost impossible to control the quality of the portal consistently. So we worked with DM to come up with a set of policies that were required,” added Dr Alam. These policies required to institute a technical reference model that will categorise the standards and technologies to enable and support the internal business processes of DM and addressed the following components:

• Service Component framework
• Hardware/Infrastructure/Networking standards
• Service Transportation framework
• Service Support Platforms
• Delivery Platforms
• Data Storage Platforms/Databases
• Security Certificates
• Payment Platform and services

Taking action:

Taking on from there, the TEXPO team took a systematic approach by drawing up the following list of actions that put together a list of policies required including:

• Policy of specification, categorisation, and publishing online pages

• Policy of creating internal online pages and intranet

• Policy of privacy and usage of information and data

• Policy of advertising on online pages

• Policy of evaluation, report usages, and periodic quality

• Policy of using common technical services

• Policy of content management and publishing

• Policy of sponsoring

• Policy of update, development and technical maintenance

• Policy of marketing websites, online pages, and search engines

• Responsibilities and required roles from concerned people in DM

• Conditions, technical features, designs and content quality

The TEXPO team then developed policies and guidelines using the below approach:

• Jurisdictional Scan

TEXPO conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the prevalent international standards and policy guidelines. An analysis of the leading e-government portals around the world enabled the team to identify prevalent trends. Before gauging the service level being provided by established practices, a broad jurisdictional scan of leading eGovernment jurisdictions like USA (Federal), UK (Federal), Canada (Federal), Singapore (National), Australia (AGIMO), Dubai (eGovernment) and European Union (IDABC) was conducted and all the information gained during the background research contributed towards preparing a comprehensive manual.

• Assessing existing Practices at DM

In the next stage, TEXPO evaluated the existing practices at DM. To address the issues properly, TEXPO required a copy of all the relevant policies and guidelines in place at DM. To get a better picture of the existing practices at DM, TEXPO also conducted a survey of the DM employees and conducted personal interviews to review the current system. The team also worked to ensure that employees were involved through the enterprise change introduction process in order to make sure that drastic changes introduced would not disrupt the work in progress.

• Analysing current practices within Dubai Government departments

Finally, TEXPO studied and compared the current practices with other departments of the Dubai Government. This enabled them to get a better understanding of how much penetration exists for all the relevant international standards in the government departments.

Finally, on the basis of TEXPO’s experience and best practices compilation, the following guidelines and policies were developed:

• Guidelines for online publishing, content management, quality, categorization and specifications

• Guidelines for portal design, development, and technical features

• Policies for using and sharing personal Data and Information

• Guidelines for Intranet and Online Pages for Internal use

• Online Advertising Policies and Best Practices on Government Websites

• Policies for marketing the DM Portals

• Guidelines for Portals’ Performance Management

• Policies for using Common Technical Services across Dubai Municipality

• Policies for Portal Updates and Technical Maintenancet

• Roles and Responsibilities of DM staff and concerned individuals and teams