This is one of my all-time-favorite articles from Harvard Business Review.

“Can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less? If so, would your colleagues put it the same way?”  The authors of the article argue that companies whose executives can honestly answer these simple questions in the affirmative are often the most successful in their industry. The same should apply to government organizations trying to fulfill their missions and objectives. Having a simple and clear statement of strategy creates alignment and a sense of common purpose among the different stakeholders. The article also argues that organizations that fail to do so “are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that never even had one”.

The article also discusses the main components that should be included in such a statement of strategy in order to gain these benefits. The full article can be found on HBR website at: http://hbr.org/2008/04/can-you-say-what-your-strategy-is/ar/1

Cheers,

Marwa A. Abdallah

تحاول الحكومات في المنطقة تطوير الخدمات التفاعلية التي تقدم المواطنين من خلال البوابات الإلكترونية والهواتف الذكية مثل خدمات التراخيص والعمالة والخدمات الصحية وغيرها

ما هي الخدمة أو الخدمات الإلكترونية الحكومية التي طالما انتظرت اتاحتها في بلدك؟ وما هي تلك الخدمة التي تعتقد أنها ستؤثر فعلياً في حياتك العملية والشخصية؟

This is one of my all-time-favorite articles from Harvard Business Review.

“Can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less? If so, would your colleagues put it the same way?” The authors of the article argue that companies whose executives can honestly answer these simple questions in the affirmative are often the most successful in their industry. The same should apply to government organizations trying to fulfill their missions and objectives. Having a simple and clear statement of strategy creates alignment and a sense of common purpose among the different stakeholders. The article also argues that organizations that fail to do so “are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that never even had one”.

The article also discusses the main components that should be included in such a statement of strategy in order to gain these benefits. The full article can be found on HBR website at: http://hbr.org/2008/04/can-you-say-what-your-strategy-is/ar/1

Cheers,

Marwa A. Abdallah

Ever tried to visit a government office to request a service? Have you experienced long waiting queues, missing documents, and maybe unavailability of a supervisor, whose approval is badly needed?  This is a thing of the past, if you live in Dubai and wish to request Business Registration and Licensing Services, logon to  Dubai Department of Economic Development, and you can select the suitable date/time of your choice, what service you wish to apply for, your preferred location and you are set! You will instantly receive an email/SMS confirmation.

Continuing to provide its citizens with smarter and more efficient e-Services, Dubai Department of Economic Development launched a new  citizen-centric eService. The Appointment Management service enables citizens to book online appointments with government officials to request the issuance of  business registration and licensing services .  On Tue Oct 26 a  new state-of-the-art center was inaugurated by Dubai’s Crown Prince at Deira Business Centre, and a set of advanced citizen eServices were launched in a splendid ceremony. Read more..

Users are able to book an online appointment from DED website to visit DED location/office and perform a service that requires attendance in person.

citizens and businesses can select the relevant service, choose their preferred location from a list of sites that offer the service and browse available time slots. The appointment can be booked online and a confirmation received via email and SMS. Any details needed during the meeting, such as a trade name, or the type of license or permit that is being requested, can be entered online and associated with the appointment. A highlight of the features include:

• Browse services, locations available appointments slots and book online
• Add additional information, or cancel and reschedule appointments
• Receive SMS and email confirmation of the appointment
• Schedule multiple appointments

Photo by MENAFN.COM

A touch-screen kiosk provides automated check-in when the citizen registers using their DED portal credentials. When the service and appointment time has been confirmed, the citizen is automatically added to the queue and visually directed to the waiting area for the appropriate service desk. A screen displays the progress of the queue and highlights the next person to be called for their appointment.

The Appointment System is managed through a Dynamics CRM Backend, with a user-friendly interface, thus system administrators can easily configure new services and facilities and define serving staff.

The new DED headquarters are equipped with touch screens to manage citizens  on- arrival electronic check-in.  A set of central screens highlighting citizens being served, waiting time, service  offered, etc. The whole process is automated and user-friendly, taking citizen step-by-step from booking to issuing the requested license

Read more about ITWorx Citizen Appointment Management

 In Egypt where increasingly women face undesirable attention from men , HarrasMap is a an independent  community watch project, planned to launch in the coming few weeks, it will enable women to report harassment instantly by sending a text message to a centralised system, the reported incidents are used to build a detailed, public map of harassment hotspots.  HarrasMap will be built on open-source mapping engine Ushahidi (crodwdsourcing crisis information system) with geocoding capabilities for cities, neighbourhoods, landmarks, etc. FrontlineSMS will be integrated with Ushahidi to allow for 2-way communication between the system and reporting victims.

Round of applause HarrasMap!

Public Sector Partner Briefing – Government Track 27^th of Sep London,

Wonderful time of the year in London, drizzly pleasant weather – Fall is well on its way! MS campus in Reading is  where partners from the UK and around the world  were invited to a full-day public sector partner briefing. The agenda included plenary session with around 250 partners turnout and vertical-specific sessions, where partners split out between 4 tracks: Local Gov/Central Gov/Health/Education.

True to my customers, I picked the LRG track where all the hype  was around :  Shared Services with scalability in mind, cloud computing, Software as a Service (Saas), Infrastructure as a services (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) as means towards cost-cutting while increasing productivity.

Georgina O’Toole from TechMarketView gave a thorough analysis of the UK public sector Software and IT Services ( SITS) market and the forecast of 2011, TMV forecasted five years of decline in the UK SITS. With central government SITS spend down by nearly 30%  before recovery and an exciting 3.6% increase in LRG SITS spend; hence, the LRG track was quite popular and that is where I had spent the entire afternoon.

Other areas of interest covered by MS team included:

– A lot of potential in BPO in local Gov

-Interoperability: Azure SDK for Java, PHP to enable the development and deployment of diverse applications on Windows Azure

– OData protocol is believed to be a front runner that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today

Glimpses on Citizen Service Platform 2.0 and what its appstore has to offer, lots of food for thought  for a busy, last quarter 2010.

A few thoughts on Successful Strategy Execution that I want to share here,

In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive global environment, governments need to move aggressively and effectively to optimize their performance and achieve their goals. The main challenge lies not only in setting the right goals but also in successfully executing those goals, updating them with changes in the external and internal environments, and disseminating information about goals, targets, and actual performance data across the huge government structure and outside to the media and public.

• § Clear dissemination of strategic direction and objectives horizontally and vertically throughout the organization
• § Aligning all enterprise activities with the strategy
• § Cascading the strategy and execution plans up to the individual levels
• § Clear ownership and accountability for strategy execution
• § Defined measurable KPIs and targets
• § Consistent follow-up on execution results to tweak and align plans and goals
• § Continuous monitoring of environment to avoid strategic drift
• § Linkage of decisions to the reasons they were made in order to keep their purpose in mind and also to allow them to be revised and tuned later on

 

The software system that supports the strategic management process is an integral part of successful execution in modern organizations. This system acts as the backbone that allows storage, communication, tracking, and analysis of the strategic performance of the organization. This system must provide for all the requirements for successful strategy execution mentioned above in order to effectively support the organization in the successful implementation of strategy, in addition to offering the tools to monitor and tune the execution process and its relation with the pursued objectives.

The need for such a system arises from the complexity of strategy execution and the challenges involved in ensuring continuous alignment of the organization with its strategies, rather than the execution processes.

Did you find US  CitySourced (read a previous post) fascinating?  here comes LoveCleanStreets from the UK’s London borough of Lewisham.

LoveCleanStreets is a free service that helps people who live or work in any of London’s 33 local authorities to upload photos of community problems that require action by the local authority.  If you live in London and got a Windows phone or an iPhone and want to report a problem for action by the authority, you can submit reports using this  free mobile phone application. You can also send a text or visit www.lovecleanstreets.org. There you can view and search for all the reports in your area and share them through social networking sites, review progress, or subscribe to updates. Full automation of case management is made available through integration with local authorities’ existing systems..

Borough of Lewisham has seen graffiti complaints fall by 30 per cent and clean-up time improve by 87% as a result of the solution.

Full story can be found here, LoveCleanStreets is powered with Microsoft technology: Bing Maps, Silverlight, .NET Framework

Gartner has just published its list of ‘cool’ Business Process Management providers of 2010 – those who made it to the top 5 are:

BizAgi

BizAgi, based in Bogota, Colombia, focuses on handing more responsibility to business users to improve processes. Its principal products include a free BPMN 1.2-based modeler, an Express Edition and its “model once, execute anywhere” edition which have all contributed to building a wide customer base that includes 150 academic institutions.

ICCM Solutions

ICCM Solutions provides an IT service management (ITSM) and service desk solution built on Metastorm BPM. Its principal product, e-Service Desk , which comes on-premises and as a hosted service, supports Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes across all phases of the business process life cycle using a BPMS that gives scope for continuous improvement in processes.

PNMsoft

PNMSoft is a member of the Microsoft Business Alliance, has developed processes that help business process outsourcing companies respond more efficiently and quickly to the changing process needs of their clients. It also focuses on improving end-to-end demand management processes between the business process outsourcing provider and its client organizations.

Questetra

Questetra provides a cloud-based solution to manage human workflow and improve worker productivity. It offers business people, who have no programming or systems knowledge, a simple to use workable platform for process improvement running on a shared Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It charges a US$ 10 per end user per month fee for this cloud service.

Whitestein Technologies

WhitesteinTechnologies applies processes that have the ability to self-adapt to changing business conditions. Focusing on an agile and dynamic world, the architecture, using a multiagent approach, ensures self-adaptive behaviour in processes whether those behaviours are proactive or reactive.

By Gartner’s definition, a BPM suite must include 10 areas of functionality:

1. Process execution and state management engine
2. Model-driven composition environment
3. Document and content interaction
4. User and group interaction
5. Basic connectivity
6. Business activity monitoring (BAM) and business event support
7. Simulation and optimization
8. Business rule management
9. System management and administration

10. Process component/registry repository

CitySourced is yet another government initiative towards engaging citizens, developed by “FreedomSpeakers”, a start-up company in LA. CitySourced is an iPhone application, precisely, “a mobile civic engagement tool” where citizens can use to identify civic issues like graffiti, trash etc, and report them to authority.  Most of us are familiar with “311” for reporting non emergency issues to the government authorities. Using CitySourced application, citizens take pictures of the issue using their iPhones, choosing the report type, write their comments and submit their reports to the city hall.

It serves both the citizens and the government, through promoting regulation and discipline, allowing citizens to make their communities a better place, as well as empower local governments can see all the reported issues and track their status.

It is interesting to know that CitySourced is built on Micrsoft Windows Azure platform. In their blog they mentioned that they are “confident that a cloud computing solution based on Microsoft Windows Azure will enable them to deliver better service to a broader audience (more customers) without worrying about infrastructure, software acquisition and service management.”

It is also worth mentioning that Eric Garcetti, the LA City Council president, announced the launch of the Citysourced platform to be piloted in Los Angeles.