In an international ceremony held recently in Chiang Mai, Thailand; FutureGov Award 2012 awarded Bahrain’s eGovernment Authority the Public Sector Organization of the Year in the Middle East Award. The Authority celebrated as the sole Arab nation to gain such recognition for its high-quality initiatives and programs as well as remarkable efforts in the development of utilizing ICT in government work.
The award is intended to honor the administrative excellence in government, education or healthcare institutions through benchmarking programs in the GCC region, beside Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon.
“We continuously keen to achieve excellence and comprehensive solutions through our initiatives, embrace the latest in ICT developments in order to deliver the best of eServices, while being committed to increase satisfaction to our customers – citizens, residents and public-private sector organizations,” eGovernment Authority (eGA) Chief Executive Officer, Mohammad Ali Al Qaed, said.
He also expressed his pride in the newly-added achievement to the authority’s record – owing to the continuous support of the Supreme Committee for Information and Communication Technology (SCICT) and the strategic objectives set in the new national eGovernment strategy 2016.
This year, the awards embraced twenty different categories, including Government Organization of the Year, Education Organization of the Year, Technology Leadership, Wireless Government, Connected Government, eGovernment, Cloud Computing, Digital Inclusion, Data Centers, Information Security, Service Innovation, Information Management, Green Government, Business Process, Government Transformation of the Year Award, Public Sector Organization of the Year – Asean, Public Sector Organization of the Year – North Asia, Public Sector Organization of the Year – SAARC, Public Sector Organization of the Year – Oceania, Public Sector Organization of the Year – Middle East.
The jury committee of the awards comprised internationally renowned professionals, senior officials in Public Service, as well as ICT and eGovernment experts. They shortlisted the winners from a total of 93 projects submitted by various intercontinental government organizations who qualified for the final round. Beside Bahrain, the winners’ list in other categories included Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Sri Lanka, Brunei and New Zealand.
eGA had also won last year’s FutureGov 2011 which was held in Malaysia, and came home with the award of the Best Public Sector Institution of the Year in the Middle East, for recognizing its National Authentication Framework project (NAF). The project aims at facilitating government services to citizens and residents by saving them time and effort through a single sign on identity on the national portal, allowing them to complete all government transactions online quickly and conveniently, without the hassle of repeated searching or re-entering of data; particularly with the growing number of government eServices.