Muscat Municipality, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, carries a huge civic responsibility and expressed a need to acquire best of breed technology solutions. The primary objective was to automate evolved processes and service offerings, manage diverse information needs, manage performance and operations and hence be able meet the challenge of rising expectations from a demanding and growing citizenry.
Muscat Municipality had traditionally been using in-house developed applications for most of their business needs; these applications were originally designed to handle mere data capture functions across various diverse business groups. These internal applications were not tightly integrated and did not cater to the evolving work flow requirements and service delivery capability required for civic customers and other stakeholders in the arena. The result over time was inevitable, and led to a situation of rampant data fragmentation across various independent and isolated applications, running in different departments across the organization. With it came the pain of unwieldy and expensive application support and incumbent maintenance issues.
This is the background to Muscat Municipality investing in a best of breed and comprehensive technology solution that not only catered for their existing business and operational needs, but also enabled a scalable and flexible framework for their growing future needs.
In addition, customers mainly citizens and companies who wish to obtain various permits such as building, construction, building repairs, licenses and parking permission, etc must submit the application personally at the Municipality’s office. They then had to wait between 1 week to 2 months (depends on the application type) to have their application processed and approved. Moreover their applications are transferred manually to other related departments which cause more delays in the application. Furthermore, each department needs to re-enter again the details of the application because the systems are not integrated to each others. This creates a lot of duplication work.
Everything was done manually and the time taken to obtain such approval was between 1 week to 2 months. Furthermore, any response to query took a considerable amount of time to answered as the staff required time to retrieve the application forms and checked on the status. Such manual process was time-consuming, tedious and labour intensive.
Hence, the IT Department together with the respective department worked in streamlining the processes to eliminate inconsistent citizen service by establishing a customer relation management system and obtaining a single citizen view. Muscat Municipality aimed to establish an automated process for services-based applications.
CRM project consists of many applications which are used to serve Muscat Municipality customers. It includes the following applications: Building Permits, Addressing, Construction Permission, Minor Building Permit, Rent Contract, Municipality License, Health Inspections, Technical Inspection, Parking Permission and Violations, and Revenue. All the applications are integrated with each other and tailored around the citizen to obtain a 360-degree view of citizens through a well-integrated customer relationship management implementation. For example, if a customer approach Muscat Municipality for any of the above services, once the customer gives the party number (Civil ID for citizens and CR for organizations), Muscat Municipality employee will know all the applications and service requests which had been applied for this customer.
|