Application
System & Information Centre

A. Problem Analysis

 1. What was the problem before the implementation of the initiative?
Describe in no more than 500, words the situation before the initiative began. What major problems and issues needed to be addressed? What social groups, e.g., the poor, illiterate, disabled, elderly, immigrants, women, youth, ethnic minorities, were affected and in what ways? The Abu Dhabi Government City Guard Application, a flagship initiative under the Abu Dhabi e-Government program and one more innovative e-participation channel offered to the Emirate population. The application was launched in 2011 amid a major push by the Abu Dhabi Emirate to foster civic participation and help derive government services modernization. Prior to this date, this vision was challenged by key and systemic issues, amongst which are: • Non effective coverage of society segments – The Abu Dhabi Government, as the case in general in public sector, was mainly focused on the counter channels to deliver its services. In fact, and prior to 2008, only 7% of government departments had contact centers that received customers’ calls or emails, and that centralized customer care for these channels. For that reason, the Abu Dhabi Government Contact Centre (ADGCC) was established in 2008 to provide services to Government Customers via integrated channels: phone, email,&online. On the other hand, recent study done by the Abu Dhabi Government in 2010 that was based on statistical information from Google “Our Mobile Planet”, ranked UAE as the country with highest rates of Smartphone penetration (73.8%). Moreover, analysis of population demographics for GCC countries showed that 72% of Smartphone owners are less than 34 years old. In this current age, high social media focus and such high Smartphone penetration rates, you may find images related to city image with no action taken to resolve the issue. At a time of high economic & population growth in the Emirate, this heavy reliance on the traditional customer service channels greatly challenged the Government’s objective to effectively engage with the entire population and solicit accurate feedback on performance of government services offered to them. Effectiveness of dealing with city Image incidents – Given the traditional channels that were available for citizens and residents to report incidents to the Government, the ADGCC and the government departments required considerable amount of information from the customer through a phone call, email, or chat to: Describe& categorizethe incident, Define exact incident location, and quantify impact to community for prioritization. The absence of enough information about the incident since first call heavily impacts the cost effectiveness of government departments trying to locate, prioritize, and resolve the incident. In those cases, it required multiple iterations between ADGCC and the customers seeking more information hindering incident resolution efforts. Coverage and Jurisdiction of Services – With the maturity and fast paced modernization of the Emirate governmental services, the jurisdiction of government departments continues to change for each service. Given that, there were many cases where incidents were reported in newly developed geographical locations that were not yet covered by existing contracts between departments with service providers or falls in other department’s jurisdiction. In order to deal with that challenge, it was required to have an accurate classification & location of the incidents to assign the incident to the right department & ensure readiness to cover those locations through service contracts based on volume of incidents for the same geographical territory.

B. Strategic Approach

 2. What was the solution?
In no more than 600 words, summarize what the initiative is about and how it solved the problem. This should include a description of the strategy including its main objectives and target audiences. The Government of Abu Dhabi is committed to continuously enhancing the quality of its services to provide benefits to all its customers by transforming government departments into customer-centric organizations. The strategic vision driving this mandate is for the Abu Dhabi Government to be a “High Performance Government Delivering World Class Services for the Benefit of All Its Customers.” Based on the Government vision, a study was done by Abu Dhabi Systems & Information Centre (ADSIC) to benchmark how other countries dealt with city image incidents and engaged community to improve government services. This study covered cities such as Boston city, State of New York, and State of California. The study also reflected upon the current landscape of e-participation channels and Smartphone applications across the Emirate and on our understanding of new Generation Government adopting a set of core principles and values. These Core Principles and values include: Customer Focus, Multi-channel Offering, Customer Experience Consistency, 360-degree View, and Customer Service Scorecard. Accordingly, a strategy for “Abu Dhabi City Guard Application” was founded based on that study and the ownership and sponsorship of this program were identified to be under ADSIC and the Executive Council respectively. Considering that the Emirate Executive Council is the highest body in the Government, its direct sponsorship greatly accelerated acceptance & readiness of government departments for the new mobile channel. Other key stakeholders were the government departments required to respond to demands &feedback from Citizens through the new Application. The strategy was then presented to Executive Council for endorsement and approval. The defined strategy set a main objective of Abu Dhabi Government is to increase the civic participation and public collaboration with the government by providing government customers the capability to express feedback, report incidents creating a closed loop system for government services improvement. The strategy then defined the requirement to develop a new e-participation technology application “Abu Dhabi City Guard Application” on top of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The new channel basically allows the public to report incidents and submit complaints which all feed to into the Government Contact Centre and gets assigned to relevant department for resolution. With its slogan "Your City, Your Community, Your App", the application aim to help improve government services and city image with the help of Community. Therefore, several incident types such as public safety, consumer protection and environmental issues have been identified. Participating government entities includes the three Municipalities of the Abu Dhabi Emirate, Abu Dhabi Police, Department of Transport, Food Control Authority and Health Authority amongst others. The application leverages government-wide contact Centre operation (ADGCC)& complements its existing channels including phone, email, and online chat liaising with 50 departments to resolve incidents. The “Abu Dhabi City Guard” strategy also institutionalized a concept of Unified Incident Reporting across the government to ensure consistency in customer experience and holistic analysis of community feedback. This required close collaboration with departments with incident reporting or e-participation initiatives to ensure process alignment and avoid duplications such as the Municipalities. The strategy then concluded with an implementation plan to Design, Develop, Transition/Rollout, and then announce the new mobile application to the Emirate Community. As a result of this implementation plan, the application was developed & released to mobile marketplaces in 2011 free to all Abu Dhabi Emirate Residents, be it UAE nationals, working expatriates, or visitors. Today, the Abu Dhabi City Guard mobile App forms a cornerstone in the Abu Dhabi Government’s drive to engage with its customers across multiple channels. It also provides a key input on community opinion of government services and feeds into decision making, improvement plans, and policies derivation.

 3. How did the initiative solve the problem and improve people’s lives?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard is a proactive attempt by the Abu Dhabi Emirate Government to engage with its Community for open and transparent collaboration soliciting their feedback to help improve services. Through an innovative approach, Abu Dhabi Government introduced the concept of crowd sourcing inspection of governmental services quality be it infrastructure inspection, food safety inspection, consumer rights, and other vital areas essential to the prosperity of any cosmopolitan city. Ultimately, government entities can take proactive measures to address the root cause of the problems reported. For instance, high volumes of incidents about food safety can potentially lead to tighter licensing requirements for certain types of restaurants. A high number of graffiti or homeless nuisance can be predictor of future safety issues in a certain area. The inspection crowd-sourcing approach by itself saved the government departments’ considerable amount of resources required to scale-up government services field inspection capabilities and thus focus their resources on incidents resolution and proactive service improvements. On a cross-government scale, the Abu Dhabi City Guard provided the Government and the Departments intelligence to proactively prioritize and improve government services based the geographical distribution and density of specific incident types over the Abu Dhabi Emirate maps.

C. Execution and Implementation

 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard implementation plan was anchored with a requirements gathering phase and design phase that ensured the program vision was clearly defined, its stakeholders are properly involved, and its implementation roadmap is adequately outlined. As mentioned earlier, the Abu Dhabi CityGuard strategy was founded on a comprehensive understanding of Abu Dhabi Government e-participation channels landscape and maturity, and the requirements of the program stakeholders. Furthermore, the strategy identified international best practices to benchmark, such as New York, California and Boston, and others dealing with city image incidents and collaborating with the community for service modernization. The CityGuard implementation plan included three main activity groups: Proper understanding of current situation, Full engagement with stakeholders, and Effective resolution of the problem. Understanding the problem –In 2009-2010, a benchmark was performed by ADSIC identifying how worldwide leading cities deal with city image incidents and engage with community to improve their services. The study also analyzed the current landscape for e-participation channels available in Abu Dhabi Government and current challenges being faced by the Abu Dhabi Government Contact Centre and government departments dealing with incidents reporting. Engagement with stakeholders– In 2010, based on the study performed, key stakeholders for the new channel have been identified & engaged in a requirement gathering phase: Starting with the Emirate Executive Council as the main sponsor for the initiative providing necessary approvals, & fostering acceptance of departments of the new channel. The government departments required to resolve feedback and incidents reported by the customers. Finally, Customer inputs, where project team analyzed of incident types received through ADGCC channels and correlated description of incidents to identify accurate incident categorization in collaboration with concerned departments. Effective resolution of the problem– In April 2011, and based on the requirements identified from stakeholder engagements, the design and development of CityGuard application started. Afterwards, Abu Dhabi CityGuard was released to the App stores (iPhone, Androids and Blackberry) in July 2011 as a soft launch. Considering that the success of Abu Dhabi CityGuard relies on the successful resolution of reported incidents by the concerned Government departments, no marketing activities for the application have been done until readiness of these departments is ensured. Accordingly, parallel with the daily operations & quarterly CityGuard application enhancement releases; another program track for Business &Service Readiness has been launched. Between August 2011 and June 2013, the Service and Business Readiness track, covered the direct engagements with around 10 key government departments responsible for the most number of incidents received through the ADGCC channels & CityGuard. For each department, the program team directly engaged with business owners within the department to analyze their readiness for the new mobile channel,& confirm availability of necessary resources required to respond to received incidents within Government predefined SLAs. The results of that phase for each department covered: Modifying service contracts with contractors to cover new geographical locations (e.g. Abu Dhabi Municipality); Reengineering of internal incident resolution processes (e.g. Center of Waste Management); Building capacity of field service workforce & inspectors; Development of advanced inspection systems to integrate with CityGuard processes (e.g. Department of Economic Development mobilizing inspectors with PDAs to validate CityGuard incidents reported); and Finally allocation of financial resources and securing Executive Council approvals. After confirming readiness of government departments and maturity of their internal incident management processes, the Abu Dhabi CityGuard was then officially launched in July 2013 in a public event. By Dec 2013, there has been an increase of 460% in customers uptake reflected in the volume of incidents reported by Customers through CityGuard application compared to the same period in 2012.

 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard relies upon several key and committed stakeholders to deliver high quality customer service to the Emirate Community At the highest level, the Executive Council provides the necessary sponsorship that is so essential in securing engagement and commitment from government departments. Under the guidance of the Executive Council, ADSIC has led the incubation of the CityGuard e-participation iniative. from its launch, through the design, development, transitioning, and operations of Abu Dhabi CityGuard. The Centralized ownership under ADSIC has been critical in ensuring sustained and steady development of the service. ADSIC also led the analysis of government departments’ readiness requirements based on joint estimation of the anticipated incident volumes. The identified departments’ requirements were presented by ADSIC to Executive Council for approval to ensure readiness of departments for the new service. ADSIC has partnered with Musanada, the Abu Dhabi Government’ shared service company, who have provided service management capability in three key areas; Contact Centre Management, Entity Relationship Management and Technology Service Management. As well as managing service delivery by 3rd partiesoutsourced service providers domestically & internationally, the management of the relationship between the Contact Centre and 50 government departments which is critical for the success of the Abu Dhabi CityGuard. Each of the Government Departments that subscribe to the Contact Centre and appoints a Channel Leader to act as the focal point for all matters relating to Customer Care within that department. This role is pivotal at marshaling efforts and resources within their department & ensuring customer service stays at the top of the department’s agenda. By maintaining regular and close contact with the Channel Leader at each department, the Relationship Management team provides support and advice to the department, helping them to meet their performance targets and, ultimately, to deliver an excellent CityGuard Customer experience.
 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard initiative has leveraged a considerable amount of resources across financial, technology and people dimensions since 2010. From the financial perspective, and to date, the program expenditure has been around 275,000 USD to develop the new service and 163,000 USD for operations and future enhancements of the service during 2013-2014. From the technology perspective, the program leverages several technology platforms and solutions provided by the Abu Dhabi City Guard mobile application. The Abu Dhabi City Guard application infrastructure (Mobile backend) is hosted in the Shared Government Data Center, a 500m2 Tier IV Data Center used for hosting Shared Government Services. Underpinning the hosting environment the Abu Dhabi Shared Government Wide Secure Network (ADNet) offers high-speed Government-to-Government and Citizen-to-Government access to the Shared Government Services, including Government Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform empowering the Government Contact Centre. Additionally, the program leverages the Abu Dhabi Government. The location based services provided on Abu Dhabi City Guard leverages in return the Abu Dhabi Government Geographic Information System (SDI). Finally, and from the people perspective, the Abu Dhabi City Guard core workforce includes 22 FTEs leveraging resources from California, USA – Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Mumbai, India. Today, and after the full operations of the new e-participation channel integrated with the Government Contact Centre, there are in excess of 540 people actively involved in the City Guard and Contact Center ecosystem. This workforce can be broadly categorized into four functions which are: 1 – Contact Center Management- approximately 14 FTEs from Abu Dhabi Systems & Information Centre and Musanada (described in the Stakeholders section). Primarily these resources provide management oversight and direction to the Abu Dhabi City Guard service. 2 – Technology Operations - approximately 11 FTEs from the outsourced systems integration partner provide technology operations and maintenance for the enterprise CRM platform (the BackOffice for City Guard service). 3 – Contact Center Operations - approximately 55 FTEs from the outsourced contact center partner provide case handling for the received City Guard incidents, contact handling for City Guard calling customers, quality control and training capabilities. These FTEs are divided along multiple roles such as Customer Service Representatives or CSR (24), Case Offices and Team Leaders (35) 4 – Entity Customer Service, 457 FTEs from government entity’s customer services divisions. This workforce is broadly divided into four roles, which are: 4.1 – Channel Leaders, 109 FTEs representing the main point of contact between the ADGCC and the entity 4.2 – Service Managers, 188 FTEs, accountable for delivery of service(s) within a government entity 4.3 – Service Owner, 131 FTEs, responsible for delivery of service(s) within a government entity 4.4 – Knowledge Champions, 6 FTEs, responsible for maintaining and distributing knowledge capital. Since the Knowledge Network is relatively new, this role is expected to be significantly expanded in the near future.

 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard initiative main objective is to increase civic participation and social inclusiveness of the entire community population. The ultimate objective behind that is to solicit accurate feedback from the Emirate community on quality of government services offered. To date, the Abu Dhabi City Guard has a clear list of benefits realized for each of the initiative stakeholders including the Abu Dhabi Government, the Government Departments, and the Community. A Cross government incident analytics capability – The Abu Dhabi Government today is able to classify and analyze the incidents reported by the Public across all government service sectors. For instance, results today shows that 75% of reported incidents were related to infrastructure & environment services, while 9% of reported incidents were against social development sector. Based on that intelligence, the Government is able to set the right plans, introduce policy changes, or avail necessary resources for government departments to enhance government service sectors based on received Customers’ feedback. As an example, the Emirate Municipalities required additional to be able to deal promptly with incidents. These resources included: Hiring new inspectors & service managers, Implementation of location based field inspection systems, Procurement of geo-enabled inspection devices such as iPads, Implementation of municipal incident management system, and creation of new service contracts required to improve city image for new geographical locations. Proactive service intelligence – Today, after the launch and operations of Abu Dhabi CityGuard, the Departments are able to analyze the geographical distribution of incidents and intelligently plan relevant service proactive improvement activities for these geo-clusters supported by on the volumes of incidents reported using CityGuard. Improved community engagement –Since CityGuard soft-launch in July 2011, the Emirate Community started to take advantage of CityGuard application to report incidents of high importance to them. In fact, the application was well received by the public during soft-launch period which was clearly demonstrated by ratings on the app stores and user reviews. This was followed by a service & business readiness phase engaging departments to ensure operational readiness until application was officially launched in July 2013. Since then, there has been an increase of 460% in the number of incident cases reported compared to the same period last year with a projected monthly volume increase of 200% based on current trends. Moreover, the number of application downloads increased by 190% after the official launch also reflecting the increasing confidence of the Community.

 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
The Abu Dhabi City Guard application follows predefined process controls to ensure effectiveness of the service and responsiveness of Government departments working on the received Customers feedback. These controls were identified earlier as part of the initiative strategy and inherited many of these controls from the Government contact centre initiative. • Incident Management Governance - To ensure tight monitoring & control of the case management value chain, a set of pre-defined KPIs are automatically generated & tracked for each case received via the Abu Dhabi City Guard Mobile App. These KPIs cover both government wide & Entity specific KPIs to govern service levels across the Government and ensure consistency of customer experience. These KPIs are then tracked on both departments and government levels to provide a much clearer picture on the levels of service offered to Abu Dhabi City Guard customers. These KPIs are being tracked in real time helping to provide live-updates on progress incidents resolution by government departments. The monitoring and analysis of departments incident handling performance is done through a set of analytical reports and live dashboards provided by a Business intelligence software component supporting Abu Dhabi City Guard application. Through this component, both the Government and the Departments are able to monitor real-time performance measures including: Service performance per department, Incident SLA compliance rates, frequently reported incident types, Incident Types analysis by government sector, by geography, and comparing case volumes to previous year figures to gauge the effectiveness of service improvements and policy changes implemented across the Emirate. Based on these analytics, necessary remediation steps can be taken, thus ensuring higher transparency and accountability within the government. • Monthly Service Reviews – The ADGCC has an Entity Relationship management team tasked to conduct monthly service reviews with each department to compare incident resolution performance with previous month and identify necessary corrective measures. • Unified Incident Management Process –Each case received through City guard Application follows a standard case management value chain covering the full lifecycle of received cases from Contact Handling, Case Creation, Case Assignment, Case Resolution, & Closure. This value chain aims to provide a good customer experience by providing an excellent service across each segment of this experience regardless of the channel adopted by the Customer.

 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
Since the development of City Guard Mobile Application in 2011 until now, the journey of the Mobile Application was a short journey but also challenging. Key challenges are: Readiness of departments& resistance for change –The government departments were concerned about the expected volume of cases that may arrive in future. In fact, the project team had to work closely with each Government service sector to estimate the volumes of cases expected through City Guard. Accordingly, estimated the additional resources required in order to be ready to handle with the expected case volumes through the new City Guard during application soft-launch period (Jul 2011 – Jun 2013). Higher level of customer service maturity – The government departments’ customer service functions are maturing as part of the Government Contact Centre initiative. However, the departments needed to adapt to higher expectation level of the community who provided exact location and image of the incident being report. Considering that, the departments needed to attend to the received cases promptly. More proactive services required – The government departments are now keen to perform more proactive improvement’s for the offered government services in order to preserve their current service levels and Public facing image. This was resolved through a series of department’s level institutional initiatives including building capacity of field service workforce and inspectors, introducing advanced inspection systems, and allocation of necessary proactive service improvement budget. Technology shortcoming –City Guard was developed about 2 years ago. Since then, mobile technology has evolved and matured to mainly address the nature of fragmented mobile platforms and operating systems. Furthermore, City Guard has been developed using three sets of codebase for iPhone, Blackberry & Androids and needed to be maintained. This challenge has been addressed through the use of HTML5 and “Device Agnostic Architecture”.

D. Impact and Sustainability

 10. What were the key benefits resulting from this initiative?
In a very short time span, the Abu Dhabi City Guard application proved value by achieving several tangible benefits to all concerned stakeholders and changing the mode of thinking of government departments about service proactive improvements since 2011. These key benefits can be summarized on both external and Institutional levels as follows: Benefits to the Emirate community:- • Easy and Instant Channel: The Abu Dhabi City Guard application provided time and financial savings to its users. To report a case, a user can, and with a few clicks create content rich case (location, images, video, description and entity) and submit it to the contact centre. In turn, the contact centre will assign the case to the responsible entity for resolution in no more than 2 hours from receipt. This automatic process provides obvious time and financial saving to the user since the alternative is to either call the contact centre and send the supporting documents by mail, fax or email or worse, drive to the entity and wait in the counter queue to speak to an agent. • Improvement to their City, Environment & Wellbeing: Abu Dhabi City Guard provide tangible benefits to the users that go beyond the financial or time savings. In fact, City Guard provide an easy channel to resolve issues that affect people’s life and livelihood directly. The City Guard application ultimately improve the direct environment for each resident by reporting incidents that typically go unreported or under served by the Government. Resolution of reported cases produces direct benefits to customers be it in their food safety, transportation and infrastructure or overall the city image. The prompt resolution of these cases creates direct and long lasting impact in the life of the Abu Dhabi Emirate’s residents. • Civic Participation & Voice of the Residents: The City Guard invites civic participation. This valuable channel provides all residents of the Emirate a say and a stake in the continuous improvements of their communities. At the time of writing of this submission document, more than 2,157 out of 2,480incidents reported since 2011 have been resolved by the Government. This number is expected to significantly increase with the launch of every marketing campaign cycle. Institutionally, City Guard provides benefits at four levels :-  Benefit to the Government: Through City Guard, the Government is able to project a more approachable and collaborative image to the Government. Additionally, the Government will be able to understand and analyze the various incidents reported across the Emirate and proactively develop improvement plans in coordination with the various government entities. Moreover, the government is able now to geographically analyze the incidents and assign incidents to concerned departments based in jurisdiction areas.  Benefits to Government Entities: Through City Guard, Government entities are able to crowd source their inspection activities, be it infrastructure inspection, food safety inspection, consumer rights, and other vital areas essential to the prosperity of any cosmopolitan city. Ultimately, government entities can take proactive measures to address the root cause of the problems reported. For instance, very high cases of food safety issues can potentially lead to tighter licensing requirements for certain type of restaurants. A high number of graffiti or homeless nuisance can be predictor of future safety issues in a certain area.  Benefit to the Abu Dhabi Government Contact Centre: With the new marketing campaigns planned for 2014/2015, City Guard will become one of the new digital channels that will require less human footprint. With this new interactive channel, the Contact Centre exposure to the public will become greater. The City Guard channel has a major advantage over the other channels at the Government Contact Centre in that it enables rich case content to be created automatically.  Benefit to the Abu Dhabi System & Information Centre: As the owner of the contact centre, and the e-Government program, ADSIC was able to integrate several e-Government platforms to provide an integrated service through City Guard. In fact, City Guard rely on the Government ESB, CRM, GIS to provide this unique service. Also the City Guard cases are integrated with other department Customer Relationship Management platforms such as Abu Dhabi Municipality CRM system.

 11. Did the initiative improve integrity and/or accountability in public service? (If applicable)
In order to ensure sustainability of the City Guard initiative, the program introduced a set of controls on both cross government and government department levels. Among these sustainability controls and enablers:- Governance of incident management process – For that, a set of pre-defined KPIs are automatically generated & tracked for each incident received through the Abu Dhabi City Guard Application. These KPIs cover both government wide & Entity specific KPIs to govern the service levels across the Government and ensure consistency of customer experience. These KPIs are being tracked on both departments and government Level to provide real-time performance information about the efficiency of incident resolution efforts offered to the Society allowing the Government & the departments the opportunity to timely intervene for performance corrective actions if needed. This is very important to monitor in order to maintain the society trust in the initiative and the supporting business processes. Efficiency of government services - Many government departments changed their contracts and performance terms with service providers and contractors to ensure continuity and cost effectiveness of services offered to the community and incident resolution efforts. This was result of a coordinated effort over the last two years, whereby City Guard project team has been working closely with the Executive Council and the Government departments to ensure that backend infrastructure (inspection, contracting etc …) and budget is available to the Departments to promptly respond to resident cases reported by City Guard. Effectiveness of City Guard service –In order to ensure the City Guard application availability for the Emirate Community around the clock, the team needed to consider the fast paced mobile platforms and smart phone devices technology trends and changes. As a result, multiple considerations has been included in the application operations including:- System availability has been consistently at 100% for the past 2 years, this is partly attributed to the Mobile Application Backend integration with the Government CRM application. The Mobile Backend provides a queuing mechanism that ensures case submissions from the City Guard application are not dependent on the availability of the Government Siebel CRM system due to any downtime or maintenance. The Mobile Backend has been designed to be horizontally scalable and the current capacity allows for 200 transactions per second which is way in excess of the current volumes, however should this start to pose a problem additional servers can be added as required to scale-up the platform. Financially, the Abu Dhabi City Guard concept of Unified Incident Reporting introduces a cross-government cost saving by providing a common platform and unified process for capturing / resolving incidents, and open collaboration with the Emirate community. This also is ensured with close collaboration with departments with incident reporting or e-participation initiatives to ensure process alignment and avoid platforms duplications such as the three Municipalities of the Abu Dhabi Emirate, and Abu Dhabi Education Council, and Center of Waste Management.

 12. Were special measures put in place to ensure that the initiative benefits women and girls and improves the situation of the poorest and most vulnerable? (If applicable)
The Abu Dhabi CityGuard introduced a major transformation in e-participation culture of the Abu Dhabi Emirate. Many lessons learned has been encountered, key ones include: Government departments needed to consider reviewing of their contracts and performance terms with service providers to be able to handle with increasing CityGuard case volumes, cover new geographical locations in Abu Dhabi Emirate, or newly introduced services promptly. An Example of that were the contractual changes introduced by Abu Dhabi Municipalities to provide effective and cost efficient CityGuard incident handling and cover new geographical locations. Based on the defined government wide KPIs for incident management enforced as part of Abu Dhabi CityGuard, the departments now needs to ensure they have back-to-back performance bonds with their contractors for compliance with overall incident management and resolution KPIs. The example of that the performance terms added by Center of Waste Management to their existing contracts with service providers dealing with trash dumping and city image incidents. Government departments need to continue improving their internal incident management & inspection capabilities to promptly resolve assigned CityGuard cases. Some incidents fall in overlapping jurisdiction areas of more than one department and were being declined by each of department. Currently, there are periodical meetings led by the CityGuard team to discuss declined cases. During that, departments negotiate and coordinate to resolve those overlapping jurisdiction pending incidents. Classifications of incidents needed to be revised to ensure accurate assignment to relevant departments. As an example, CityGuard team introduced new incident categories for “Consumer Protection”, or merging “Expired Medications” and “Expired Food” incident types under a new category called “Expired Products”. With the abundance of mobile technology, multiple platforms, advanced smart devices and high network availability has triggered the need to adopt a “Device Agnostic Architecture” to enable CityGuard to comply with these changing needs and de-couple from the fast changing technology trends. Also, the Abu Dhabi CityGuard concept of Unified Incident Reporting introduced a cross-government cost saving by providing a common platform and unified process for capturing / resolving incidents, and open collaboration with the Emirate community. This also was ensured with close collaboration with departments with incident reporting or e-participation initiatives to ensure process alignment and avoid platforms duplications such as the three Municipalities of Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi Education Council, and Center of Waste Management. Future CityGuard plans includes to add transitional government services such as paying utility bills, access government information, such as public transport timetables. CityGuard was originally designed for a resident to report a case, and the case to be automatically submitted to the Government. The case can only be viewed by the user and the Government. With social media, engagement becoming increasingly more important in the public sector, CityGuard is planning to provide social capabilities around incident reporting (Fikra aka. Idea). For instance, users will have the capability to view cases reported by others in their vicinity. Additionally, they can comment on these cases, and potentially view and rate the resolution provided by the Government.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   System & Information Centre
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Khadeeja Al Hammadi
Title:   Contact Centre Service Manager  
Telephone/ Fax:  
Institution's / Project's Website:  
E-mail:   haares@live.com  
Address:   -
Postal Code:   3133
City:   AD
State/Province:  
Country:  

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