Questions/Answers

Bahrain has emerged as one of the strongest champions of eGovernment in the Region. Bahrain has a wealth of experience replacing time-consuming paper-based processes with the end-to-end online services which customers now expect and demand. However, handling complaints became a question in mind of national leadership. Under traditional models, there were no common channels for citizens, residents, and businesses to interact with government to resolve their issues and provide feedback for change. Before Tawasul, the complaint management approach represented a series of missed opportunities to improve services, monitor performance and ultimately deliver increased customer satisfaction to citizens. Tawasul digital Framework is a national system available for citizens, residents, and businesses to improve efficiency and effectiveness in communicating directly and transparently with 47 governmental entities in Bahrain in relation to complaints, enquirers, and suggestions to improve public administration. Tawasul (an Arabic term meaning communication), is owned by Prime Minister office and developed by Information & eGovernment Authority to open direct efficient and effective channel of communication for both people and public entities while ensuring accountability, responsiveness, inclusiveness, and impact-fullness under the supervision of Prime Minister office. Tawasul become an essential part of public administration context in Bahrain and supported in reinforcing the complaint management culture. The digital framework fosters participatory engagement of people and broaden their share in share in national development through sharing their innovative ideas and suggestions. The system is hosted on the national eGovernment portal (Bahrain.bh/Tawasul) and migrated to Bahrain government cloud. A dedicated mobile App has been developed for Tawasul to add better user-experience, make it even easier, and more user-friendly for people to submit their cases through Tawasul.

Tawasul is a government platform that fosters digital engagement between the government and the public to enhance cooperation, transparency, and accountability. Through its seamless digital communication, accountability policies, and whole-of-government approach, people have become more empowered than ever to participate in decision-making. Public agencies have become more efficient in addressing people’s feedback and issues fairly and effectively, improving public administration and helping to achieve the 2030 agenda. On the leadership level, Tawasul data has given the government of Bahrain a useful insight for building public strategies and policies that are in-line with public needs and the overall national development agenda.

The Tawasul digital platform and its people-centric approach contributes to several SDGs. Goal-8: Tawasul improves the productivity of public entities and economic growth through technological upgrades and innovation in government-people communication and collaboration. Goal-9: Tawasul fosters innovation in public administration by providing a reliable and resilient platform accessible to all, including vulnerable groups. It promotes inclusiveness within the digital community to help achieve the 2030 agenda. Goal-10: The Tawasul digital framework and its accountability policies are monitored by the Prime Minister’s Office. They promote people empowerment at all levels and eliminate all forms of inequality regardless of age, sex, social status, and educational level. Constituents are treated equally, and are given equal opportunities supported by laws and concerned policies. Goal-12: Being a fully digital communication platform, Tawasul contributes to sustainable fossil-fuel consumption and reduces paperwork. Goal-16: Tawasul’s policies, under the leadership of the Prime Minister Office, has promoted the transparency and accountability of public agencies at all levels. Focusing on rule-of-law, timely responsiveness, participatory decision-making, and inclusiveness, Tawasul promotes sustainable and strong institutions in Bahrain. Goal-17: Tawasul forms inter-governmental partnerships with public entities, including knowledge transfers to developing or least developed countries during international capacity-building programs.

Tawasul promotes participatory engagement of the public to be part of the national development agenda . Tawasul has become a sustainable solution to save the public time, money, and effort, while effectively addressing issues faced with several government entities. Additionally, Tawasul contributes to environmental sustainability by streamlining the case management process, reducing carbon-emissions and paperwork consumption.

Complaint management was a lengthy, confusing, and fragmented process. Departments often had highly varied complaint management procedures with large numbers of forms and complex, time-consuming processes. Businesses were hardly motivated to complain due to the process’s complexity. The voice of women, the physically handicapped and the elderly was often left unheard as they simply were unable to travel to government offices to resolve their issues. Some government departments were not connected to a complaint management process at all, while those that did used manual or partly-automated mechanisms. Thousands of staff hours were spent addressing submissions individually. This fragmented and manual process made it virtually impossible for the Central Government to evaluate the performance of individual Ministries, let alone receive a holistic view of overall performance, as there was no central mechanism for capturing comments and developing insights. Tawasul’ s framework resolved these missed opportunities by bridging the gap between the public and governmental entities through innovation, a whole-of-government approach, accountability, inclusion, and responsiveness. The use of data analysis helped the Central Government build a sustainable development agenda focused on people’s needs to improve efficiency and effectiveness in public administration.

Tawasul’s framework allowed people to resolve issues with governmental entities seamlessly, efficiently, and with a high level of transparency and accountability, regardless of the constituent’s age, sex, social status and education level. Tawasul equally empowered vulnerable groups, including women, who might face difficulties in traveling to government offices. Instead, they can now resolve their issues seamlessly through the Tawasul platform.

Tawasul is a multi-stakeholder solution adding value to several groups including: - Citizens, residents, and businesses: resolving issues related to services offered by different governmental entities efficiently and seamlessly through a unified case handling process. - Governmental entities on the Tawasul platform: end-to-end transformation of the case handling process, promoting accountability, managing employee performance, and taking advantage of data collected in the system to plan for development and improvement. - Central Government (Prime Minister’s Office): improve public agencies’ performance, better monitor systems, and the ability to plan the national development agenda based on the holistic data related to repeated issues across government, which are collected through Tawasul.

Tawasul was developed by the iGA for the Prime Minister’s Office to streamline and optimize suggestions and complaints handling across the government, unifying it under a single integrated framework. The system’s pilot phase was developed in May 2013 and officially launched by the Prime Minister in January 2014. A user-friendly mobile app was developed and launched in June 2016 with more features to allow user to submit cases within 1 minute and get notified about its progress regularly. Since its establishment, the Tawasul system and mobile app have gone through a range of improvements and enhancements to its user-interface, governmental entities’ backend systems, and the leadership dashboard, adding features and functionalities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of case handling. All development processes must to go through testing, quality assurance, and staging phases before going live in the production phase. In 2017, the Prime Minister’s Office initiated the Tawasul Excellence Award, whereby high performing governmental entities are awarded annually by the Prime Minister personally. The evaluation is based on their adherence to a pre-defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) and quality of response. This initiative boosted the public agencies’ performance on Tawasul dramatically, with their overall SLA adherence reaching 98.5%.

Tawasul had to overcome several obstacles in its path towards success: - Financial: Tawasul was developed by iGA’s employees national resources - Technical: A dedicated iGA team supports Tawasul users remotely - Storage: Data has been moved to AWS cloud servers - Culture: Communication activities to promote a complaint/suggestion handling culture in relation to Tawasul’s framework was conducted by the iGA, the Prime Minister Office and public entities individually - Entities’ performance within Tawasul: Periodic automated status reports to the Ministers of the respective public entities, continuous training by the iGA, and the Tawasul Excellence Award by the Prime Minister

Tawasul is an end-to-end digital transformation of the complaint management process, integrating multiple stakeholders under one platform (governmental entities, the public and the Prime Minister’s office). Hosted on AWS’s government cloud, it is supported by a user-friendly mobile app featuring innovative tools. Tawasul is a flow management system with automated periodic reporting tools, auto-notification via sms and email, and auto-escalation to higher levels. The app user interface utilizes mobile features such as user profiling to save personal data during case submission, GPS for address recognition, and cameras to snap defaults in public facilities and attach documents.

Before Tawasul was established, the iGA had another system to address complaints related to online services on Bahrain’s National Portal. In 2013, the iGA was inspired by the holistic approach of the Bahrain Excellence Center in assessing all governmental entities and improving performance in Public Administration. The idea of having a complaint system was nationalized and placed under the umbrella of the Prime Minister’s Office. To do so, many regional and international best practices were followed, such as those of Mygov.ae in UAE.

Tawasul utilized data analytics tools to provide Central Government with most repeated cases and plan the development agenda. Auto-escalation, auto-notification and system-generated reports are also part of the technological tools embedded within the system. The mobile app is connected to a chat bot tool integrated with the Government Services Contact Center using Artificial Intelligence tools to assist Tawasul users. The app also includes a Fix-to-Go feature where the user can snap a photo of any defaults in public facilities and the system will auto-read the photo using AI to detect the information and provide the needed support.

As part of its international partnership and knowledge exchange commitment, the iGA conducted several capacity-building sessions with government entities from developing and least developed countries during UN Study Tours. Moreover, and from time to time, the iGA receives several international delegations from many developing countries such as Egypt, Palestine, Morocco and others, to whom it showcases the Tawasul process and development plan to share knowledge and help build capacities.

In general, Tawasul is not a complicated system. It is an enhanced flow management system with straightforward integrations and auto-functionalities. The implementation doesn’t require massive technical complications and financial resources. Therefore, the success pillars of any framework like Tawasul are the political will of the leadership to improve performance, government entities’ responsiveness, accountability and transparency, and public awareness campaigns to manage cultural perception and buy-in. These pillars, along with good technical development, make Tawasul a very well-transferable solution to other countries’ contexts.

The system was fully developed and implemented for the Prime Minister’s Office by the iGA’s technical team. It utilized the AWS government cloud to host Tawasul and for data storage, which optimized the costs associated with data storage.

Tawasul is a sustainable digital solution to streamline communication and case-handling between people and governmental entities. Once the system’s framework was established, policies set, government employees trained (using a train-the-trainer approach), and performance management tools established, the framework will continue to serve the purpose efficiently and effectively over a long period. Moreover, the Tawasul framework will add value to the sustainability of public service improvements across the government, and reinforce the country’s competitiveness in public administration. In addition, Tawasul has had great impact on the reduction of paperwork and the promotion of the sustainable consumption of fossil oil.

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Tawasul’s framework is evaluated internally by a Quality Control/ Quality Assurance team on a regular basis to ensure that all functions and processes are working well. Tawasul is also evaluated by an external consultancy firm to ensure the maturity level of the system and the validity of the process workflow. In addition, performance management of governmental entities in Tawasul is evaluated by the Prime Minister’s Office to ensure system reliability, responsiveness, and impact-fullness. Tawasul was assessed by awards such as the World Summit Awards, Salim Al Ali Award and Arab Government Excellence Award based on a range of criteria.

Accuracy of navigation and functionalities links, validity of work-processes, system maturity, user experience, user satisfaction, app downloads, usage number, achievement of Service Level Agreement (SLA), and quality of response.

- Quality Control: Tawasul has passed all QC/ QA standards and all corrective points have been resolved. - External Evaluation: Tawasul is matured and complies with all complaint handling standards. As per a survey conducted by the iGA in February 2021, Tawasul is a powerful tool in resolving citizens', residents’, and businesses’ issues with public agencies in Bahrain in a seamless and time/effort saving manner. - Entities Performance Evaluation: Achievement of SLA is at 98.5% i.e. 98.5% of total cases received by different governmental entities through Tawasul (47 entities) are resolved in line with the SLA. - Awards Evaluation: Tawasul was named Best Innovative Solution at the Arab Excellence Award in 2020 by the Arab League and Best ICT Slution at the AlSabah Award for Informatics. It was shortlisted to the final stage at the World Summit Award (WSA).

Tawasul was developed by the iGA for the Prime Minister’s Office to transform citizens’, residents’, and businesses’ communications with governmental entities through a unified and easy process aimed at the highest levels of efficiency and effectiveness. Tawasul has become one of the key ways for governmental entities to communicate with the public and resolve their issues. Tawasul is also one of the most important projects under the umbrella of the Prime Minister’s Office. Utilizing public feedback and participation, it supports governmental entities dealing with public issues and planning the national development agenda. The iGA is responsible for on-boarding governmental entities as well as training them and providing on-going technical support. Governmental entities are responsible for handle the cases individually using Tawasul while the Prime Minister’s Office is in charge of managing performance and ensuring the SLA is achieved.

Tawasul is in line with the 2030 development agenda by ensuring sustainability, fairness, and competitiveness of public administration in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Tawasul is a classic example of government-people collaboration built of a participatory engagement to improve public administration and public service delivery. The development and implementation of Tawasul was conducted as a collaboration between the following key stakeholders: a) iGA: Develop, maintain, and enhance Tawasul system and mobile App by integrating required technologies, data storage, on-board governmental entities, train them and provide them on-going technical support. b) Prime Minister’s Office - Coordinate between different stakeholders and manage the performance of Tawasul government entities. c) Tawasul governmental entities– Handle cases received through Tawasul and ensuring the SLA is achieved. The iGA is responsible for promoting and sustaining awareness of Tawasul among the public and to build an enhanced culture of complaint and feedback management. Moreover, governmental entities are responsible for encouraging their customers to communicate with them through Tawasul on any issues or with regards to any feedback they might have.

The key lesson learned in that the success and effectiveness of any complaint/ suggestion management system is complete collaborative framework consisting of main pillars: - Political will and leadership support to sustain the improvement of public administration and performance management - Commitment of governmental entities to showcase responsiveness, effectiveness, and efficiency - Cutting-edge Technology to ensure streamlining the process, better user experience, inclusiveness, and on-going support - Strong culture and awareness that believes in participatory engagement of people to be part of national development agenda and believes in constructive complaints and feedback towards providing all with better services. iGA and Prime Minister office are in process to launch Tawasul 4.0 in Q2 of 2022 by adding new functionalities and features as part of improvement plan: - Adding Thanks & Appreciation to Tawasul to convey appreciation to a government entity and/or a public servant. - Adding more categories into Fix-to-Go feature in Tawasul App - Adding AI feature and image recognition into Fix to Go option in Tawasul App - Improving accessibility features by adding voice case submission, color contrast change, text to speech, and direct video support with a sign language - A dedicated version of Tawasul for Business