Ministry of Labor eService
Ministry Of Labor, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia

The Problem

Saudi Ministry of Labour (MOL) is responsible for processing all matters related to employment and labour in Saudi Arabia. Spanning 38 offices throughout the kingdom and serving about 1,500,000 establishment and more than 8,000,000 labor across the kingdom, MoL are processing 30,000 requests per day. Establishment representatives had to visit labor offices regularly to benefit from MoL service such as Work Permit renewal and issuing, Expats Labor Request, Sponsor Transfer, Change Worker Information, Change Worker Job description and much more. For each request the representative had to provide the needed papers, forms and evidence for his requests.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
MoL eService initiative was building and automating the core services covering Employment, Work Permits and Manpower services. and connecting them with the other government entity such as Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Commerce, General Organization for Social Insurance through the Saudi Government Service Bus, this will help increase the productivity of the public offices and MOL, it will also save money and effort by minimizing the redundant manual paper based process. Saudi Government Service Bus acts as a central integration platform that provides shared, value-added, electronic and transactional services among Saudi governmental entities connected together. The eServices initiatives allowed the business to submit their requests and benefit from MoL services without the need to visit the labor offices.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The solution was proposed and implemented by Ministry of Labor and Yesser (e-government Program). The main stakeholders of the solution were: Ministry of Labor, Yesser and Ministry of Interior, Business establishments.

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
In order to implement the eService Initiative MoL determined the following important objectives to achieve by the end of the project:
1. Build portal infrastructure that conclude with building high availability system that is critical to MoL success.
2. Manage and enhance MoL website/portal building, management and maintenance by a best of class portal that will enable MoL to publish services for Employees, Citizens, Ministries and Private sector companies.
3. Build the eight services as outlined in this RFP, six external services and two internal one that are web based and fully automated.
4. Consolidate MoL current distributed database into a centralized database, utilizing as much as possible currently used hardware and software.
5. Replace the existing centralized data warehouse and provide for all the reporting and statistical functions required.
6. Replace and Enhance the existing Extranet company information web site to allow for:
a. Further search capabilities
b. Company ability to update information.
7. Acquire and build a loosely coupled architecture that is scalable on-demand and utilizing caching and load-balancing techniques.
8. Introduce loosely coupled components in the solution architecture for MoL eServices in G2C, G2E, G2G models
9. Enhance system management by acquiring a set of tools that enhance management, tuning and administer MoL underline resources System, Information, Memory, Storage, eService, Application … etc.
10. To provide cross-platform policy management and administration and Internet authorization and access control for the extended enterprise and Single point of control with Role-based security management and Single Action Management and Secure delegation of the responsibilities without need to give out root authority and complete audit trail of administrator activity
11. Skill transfer and proper training to MoL project teams so that they can develop and establish well skilled groups to continuously enhance and improve MoL portal components.
12. All portal solution applications and data must reside on external SAN storage. It is not acceptable to store any portal applications and/or files locally on any server internal storage except for system software. In this case, servers must support RAID hot pluggable disks for storing operation systems and systems software

MoL has identified the following business drivers in support of its objectives:
1. Availability: 24/7 uptime and secure internet access will maximize MoL investment.
2. Reduce MoL operating costs.
3. Enhance MoL content publishing and distribution.
4. Increase Operational efficiencies: by using workflow tools will decrease cycle time will reduce less efficient habits.
5. Increased productivity: citizen, customers and employees will be empowered to discover, share information and identify people with relevant expertise in real-time.
Better access to information and improved decision making: MoL Portal will give MoL decision-makers a single place to access relevant information

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
• Make Process Re-Engineering for all the processes and services for MoL
• Establishment link between Ministry of Labor and Ministry of Interior to accommodate the heavy data exchange
• Link MoL with other government agency through the Government Service Bus
• Centralizing all the data in one central repository
• Performing Data Cleansing and purification on the data through the link with MoI
• Building a robust data center
• Engage the establishments and a sample of private beneficiary in testing the services
• Make an intensive market campaign to mitigate the change management
• Make a training for using the new eService
• Launch the service on a defined segment of beneficiaries
• Launch the services for all the users

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The initiatives phased a lot of challenges such as:

1. Change Management which have been overcome by making marketing campaign and incentives
2. Cleansing and accuracy of the historical data and have been overcome by the collaboration between the MoL and the other entities to verify the accuracy of Data. Also, MoL made a campaign for the establishment to provide the correct data.
3. Process Re-engineering which have been overcome by make a process reengineer for all the eService processes and involving all stakeholders on the re-engineering process.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
We spent around 40,000,000 SR the number of human resources working on this initiative around 35 persons.
We assign to each eServices owner his team assemble from business users plus the technical person all the owners reported to the project manager the development was offshore.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The experience gained in this initiative can be replicated to all the public service in Saudi specially that MoL services is considered that first service using G2G integration through the Saudi Government Service Bus implemented lately. The methodology of process management and data cleansing can be reused and transferred in a lot of government agency

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The implementation of eServices in MoL decreased the paper work, citizen visiting to the MoL offices, reduce the time of transactions and help in enhancing the transparency between the Ministry and citizens.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   Ministry Of Labor, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Sultan Al Harbi
Title:   E-Government Project Manager  
Telephone/ Fax:   +96612006666
Institution's / Project's Website:  
E-mail:   salharbi@mol.gov.sa  
Address:   Ministry Of labor
Postal Code:  
City:   Riyadh
State/Province:   Riyadh
Country:   Saudi Arabia

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