| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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Bahrain 2030 vision “To develop world-class infrastructure links to Bahrain Global Economy.” has been answered by GIS Directorate, CIO by implementing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) at the national level, for the Kingdom of Bahrain. Bahrain Spatial Data Infrastructure (BSDI) portal is the manifestation of the NSDI initiative to serve Government Organization, Private Sectors and Academic Institutions of the country to foster the creation of wealth, innovation and economic value. The current e-Wayleave Clearance System initiative has been developed as part of NSDI for Bahrain and therefore lines up itself with the Bahrain 2030 vision.
The initiative was conducted according to the following phases:
PLANNING: Feb 2011
In this phase, the main priority was to understand the manual wayleave clearance process and to standardize the different workflow procedures for each stakeholder. Therefore intensive meetings were held where participating stakeholders briefed their wayleave approval process and stated their specific requirements in conjunction to the broader e-Wayleave framework. The NGIS steering committee has invited all the stakeholders to weekly meetings where the charter for the E-Wayleave Clearing project has been formed. Also the stakeholders were made aware of the benefits and efficiency the E-Wayleave system will bring. The aim was to establish a collaborative environment of various Government and public stakeholders working towards a common goal of making the government sector more productive and accountable in delivering shared government services. Implementation scale, deployment dependencies, readiness of users, associated deployment risks, scheduling and resource availability was examined. Also during this phase a detailed pilot approach, identification of appropriate participants, identification of plan the pilot environment was developed
PILOTING: March 2011-Sept 2011
During this phase, the focus was on the high level integration and interoperability of the Prime Stakeholders in the e-Wayleave process workflow and in enhancing the decision making capability of the stakeholders by integrating it with GIS technology. It allowed the implementation to validate its approach for full application deployment to uncover operability issues associated with production-like condition and to provide an opportunity to address these issues before full application roll out. Also lot of capacity building programs were carried out to make the user familiar with Geographic Information System and its use in decision making and approval processes.
SCALING: Sept 2011 –Oct 2013
In this phase the service was extended to all stakeholders identified for the E-WayLeave clearance process with a focus on incorporating stakeholder internal specific approval workflow in the system and to enhance the user experience and increase accountability. Due to the huge increase in number of users to the portal, the infrastructure has also been scaled to maintain the sustainability of the Wayleave services and support the integration with the different technologies adopted by the stakeholders. After the deployment during this phase both the manual and online system were operational for 1 year following which the manual process was phased out and entire process of way leave approval went online.
MONITORING AND REFINEMENT: Oct 2013 – now
In this phase the prime focus was to monitor the performance of the implemented system and enhance user experience. With users having something in hand to work with, it was easier for them to visualize many features which were not initially considered in the original plan or were omitted for different reason. With the key objective of making the way leave approval process faster, transparent with high level of approval confidence and users started to realize the benefits, the users themselves are coming up with new ideas to enhance the system.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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The e-Wayleave system is a mixture of G2G & G2B. The System has in fact made the Government to Government data transmission and services more accountable, flexible and standardized which in turn had tremendously increased the decision making capabilities of the organizations thus improving the equilibrium of governance by Bahrain Government Organizations
The main stakeholders with their role in the project is given below
o Ministry of Works, Kingdom of Bahrain (MOW) – The Central Planning Office (CPO), MOW has been responsible for leading the initiative and has been the prime stakeholder in designing and rolling out the initiative. They are also responsible for administering the Wayleave approval process. The other directorates within MOW particularly the Roads Directorate (RD) participate in the Wayleave process either as Wayleave Requestor or Approval entity.
o Central Informatics Organization (CIO) – The GIS Directorate, CIO has been entrusted with the responsibility of designing, development and implementation of the Wayleave web application within BSDI framework. The entity provides the base-map data and manages BSDI implementation which provides a platform to share geospatial data by all participating stakeholders. CIO provides the technology innovations.
The following stakeholders participate in the process as End users, either by raising or approving Wayleave request and sharing spatial data and information over BSDI to support the overall process.
o Electricity & Water Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain (EWA) – The Electricity & Water Transmission and Distribution directorates (EDD, ETD, WDD, WTD) of EWA
o Ministry of Works (MOW)- The Roads Planning, Design and Maintenance Directorates (RPMD, RPDD), Sanitary Engineering Planning and Projects Directorate (SEPPD, TSE)
o Telecommunication Regulatory Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain (TRA) – BATELCO & Bahrain Interchange Exchange (BIX) through TRA
o Ministry of Municipality & Urban Development (MUD)
o Tatweer Petroleum, Bahrain
o Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO)
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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Within a broad framework of “The Government Sector to become more productive and accountable for delivering quality services”, the e-Wayleave Clearance System developed brings various stakeholders involved in the clearance process in a unified framework where various government agencies can work in parallel on National Development Goals. The ROI for the project can be assessed through a Public Value Framework rather than through Cost Benefit Analysis. The return can be assessed by looking for both the internal value to government operations, plus the broader political and social returns to the public at large.
No financial assistance was requested for the initiative. The existence of BSDI provided for the infrastructure that was desired for the project. Presence of trained and skilled human resources dedicated for GIS development, disregarded the need of engaging any external vendor to execute the work thus obliterated the requirement of any additional funds other than the overhead expenses of the human resources involved in the project.
Human Resource
The human resources dedicated for the project with their number & responsibilities are given below
Project Manager (1) – Project plan preparation; Cost, Time, Schedule and Delivery Management; Risk management; Resolve conflicts & technical issues; Monitor the project efforts within the planned efforts and timeline; Coordinate all stakeholder activities; Oversee delivery
Business Analyst (1) – Understand and Analyze stakeholder business requirement and translate those to application functionalities. Participate in Testing.
Stakeholder Representative Member (20) – Review the project progress; Resolve conflicts, escalated issues and give directions; Provide resolution to queries; Verify and Sign off all the deliverables within the agreed timelines; Facilitate interaction with all user groups and elicit timely responses; Provide infrastructure facilities for On Site Project activities; Speak-out the business processes of various directorates; Assist the CIO team to gather and analyze the user requirement; Conduct periodic project review meetings
GIS Admin Support (1) – Provide right environment to the developers on the server side; Ensure access and right privilege is provided to the developers and analyst to work on the data; Create and publish map services to be used in the project; Guide and support the development team with Arc GIS; Set up test environment
Developers (3) – Participate in need assessment; Design the System; Develop the system and write codes for all sections of the application; GUI preparation with the help of the team; Deploy the application on servers for UAT
Database Administrator (1) – Design database; Manage and maintain the Spatial and application Databases; Load the project specific data in the multiuser database; Manage and monitor the updating of Spatial data in the Centralized spatial Database.
Technical Resource
The application mainly leverages on GIS technology to support the process of Wayleave approval. Given below are the various technologies used in implementation of the System.
Database
• Oracle 11g RDBMS - storing and managing Wayleave Data
• ArcSDE 10.2 - GIS data storage and manipulation
Development Environment
• Microsoft Windows
• Wayleave is developed in ASP.NET 3.5
GIS Technology
• For mapping and data manipulation ArcGIS server 10.2 was used to implement GIS functionalities
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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i. Improvement of Wayleave Lifecycle
Online transaction made the Wayleave approval process a more easy experience for the stakeholders. In the earlier manual process a maximum of 4 Wayleave Request per day were created as it involved a lot of paper work. However with the development of the E-Wayleave System it was observed around 10 to 15 Wayleave Request was generated.
In the developed online System the Wayleave Request is delivered to concerned Stakeholder instantaneously thereby considerably reducing the Wayleave Approval Cycle Time.
The current developed online system has been totally eliminated the issue of lost Wayleave.
From weeks and if not months in the manual process, Wayleave now gets approved within 5 days provided it satisfies all requirements in the E-Wayleave System.
Not only these, making the Wayleave request and approval process available through a web application, has helped the process go near paperless, creating a clean and green environment.
ii. Cost Efficiency
With the implementation of the automatic E-Wayleave clearance system, the stakeholders not only are saving hugely on resource cost but also on logistics and contingencies involved in the entire Wayleave Approval Lifecycle.
E-Wayleave System also provides tools which allow various stakeholders to know each other’s project plans in a same location resulting in sharing the execution cost which in turn provides effective cost saving for government.
Since the entire deployment has been taken care by CIO through the already implemented spatial data infrastructure, it has tremendously decreased the cost of technology ownership of the External Stakeholders.
iii. Government Service Efficiency
The reduction in time for Wayleave approval process has resulted in timeliness of service delivery by government authorities, so is Stakeholder’s accountability. With the new system in place, there is a marked Transparency in the Wayleave lifecycle resulting in tremendous improvement in the efficiency of Ministries, Public and Private Organizations in serving the citizens in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
iv. Improvement of Wayleave approval confidence
The Current system integrated with Bahrain Spatial Data Infrastructure providing all spatial information within the application interface itself has greatly improved the approval confidence.
v. Process Standardization
In the development process of E-Wayleave System, organizational business process work flows has been re-engineered where few un-useful procedures have been dropped from the process and some functions have been added to speed up the workflow. This has also led to process standardization of Wayleave Request & Approval across Stakeholder Community.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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The project was undertaken, with Public Interest & Benefits getting a higher priority over financial measures. According the Key Performance indicators were more oriented towards Operational and Service Levels goals rather than direct cost performance. The KPI framework for the project consists of the following 3 groups
1. Mission Effectiveness
2. Client Satisfaction
3. Internal Process
The Critical Success Factor for Mission Effectiveness includes “Provision of Quality, Cost Effective and Timely Service by Government Agencies for WayLeave”. It is objected towards the following each with their own KPIs measured against different units/scales as indicated below.
1. Eradicate Delays in WayLeave Approval
• KPI1 - WayLeave Request Creation Time change - 95%
• KPI2 - WayLeave Distribution Time change - 99%
• KPI3 - WayLeave Loss numbers – 0 – No loss
• KPI4 - WayLeave Approval Time Change - 90%
2. Make Approval Process Transparent
• KPI1 - WayLeave Traceability - 100%
3. Quality Service Provision
• KPI1 - Level of Confidence while approval WayLeave - 100%
4. GIS Data Sharing
• KPI1 - Base data Availability & Usage while approving WayLeave - 100%
• KPI2 - Data Layer Shared By Stakeholder Organizations increase - 20%
• KPI3 - Stakeholder Data Updation frequency increase - 5
The Critical Success Factor for Client Satisfaction is “Participation of the Stakeholders”. It is objected towards the following each with their own KPIs measured against different units/scales as indicated below.
1. Stakeholder Satisfaction
• KPI1 - Satisfaction to Development Timelines - 4
• KPI2 - Satisfaction to Developed UI - 5
• KPI3 - Satisfaction to Requirement Fulfillment - 4
2. Stakeholder Benefits
• KPI1 - Satisfaction to benefits of the Apps - 4
The Critical Success Factor for Internal Process indicates the “Effectiveness of Project Delivery Process”. It is objected towards the following each with their own KPIs measured against different units/scales as indicated below.
1. On Time Delivery
• KPI1 – Percentage of Work package adherence to schedule - 100%
• KPI2 – Number of assigned resources vs planned resources - 100%
2. Delivery to Commitment & Full Scope
• KPI1 – Percentage of critical assumptions that has changed - 5%
• KPI2 – Scope change compared to what planned - 5%
3. Quality Defect Free Delivery
• KPI1 – Number of Faults Reports – 86
• KPI2 – Number of Fault Slip Through - 3%
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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Several challenges had to be overcome before the system could be successfully implemented and made operational. The key challenges faced and their overcome strategies have been mentioned below.
I. At the beginning it was observed that each Stakeholder had their own policies and internal workflows for the Wayleave Approval. Striking the right balance between the process generalization and stakeholder specificity posed a huge challenge. A Single Point of Contact for each Stakeholder was designated and he was involved in the project continuously to ensure that the design met the requirements of all the departments at a very early stage. This has in turn led to the customization of the application as per stakeholder internal approval process to the best possible way.
II. As there were huge number of users who would be accessing the system, the existing infrastructure was not sufficient to handle the increased amount of users with the same quality of service. This challenge was overcome through thorough system design and upgrading and enhancing the existing infrastructure to handle additional and data volume for the next 20 years.
III. CAD integration with Online GIS environment was a challenged posed which was sorted out through technical support from ESRI technical team.
IV. Since there were many stakeholders involved in the project, the Data inconsistency and coordinate system mismatch of the data from various Stakeholders posed a threat to the system. It was mitigated through development of data standardized documents and implementing the same for each stakeholders.
V. Transition from the Manual System to the E-Wayleave System was in fact a challenge. After much brainstorming with all the stakeholders it was decided that both the process would operate parallel for one month after which the manual system will fade out and give way to the full-fledged E-Wayleave System
C. IMPACT AND SUSTAINABILITY
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