The transaction was with the passport administration, the first government administration to implement the service as a step toward e-government. “What was achieved is a quality transition for the chamber in its efforts to become an information technology reliant administration in serving its members,” said Mohammed Al-Sharif, secretary-general of JCCI.
The manager of the information sector at JCCI, Mohyeddin Al-Hakami pointed to the advantages of this service. “It will save the member the trouble of coming to the chamber to authenticate the applications in person, which also reduces the queue line and processing time at the chamber, in addition to providing government administrations with a secure and reliable method for processing documents and preventing fraud,” said Al-Hakami.
The project took almost two years to implement after going through stages of design and testing before being approved a year ago by the Ministry of Commerce and by the Council of Saudi Chambers. The whole project from program design to development and implementation was done by a national company.
The twenty other chambers are expected to implement it soon.
“This is the first step and eventually the project would expand to include more government administrations and private sectors that would ease the businessmen’s transactions,” said Saleh Bogary, the JCCI technical adviser.
The service is provided for free for the chamber’s members — companies, industries, banks, businesses — allowing them to eventually process their applications through the different government administrations electronically.
The reporters witnessed the signing of an exit-entry application for the passport administration by Mohammed Domyati, personnel and administration manager, at the Arabian Food Supplies Company for one of the company’s employees using a “smart board”.
He sent the application via e-mail to the JCCI where his signature was authenticated with the signature available in the system and sent the document back where Domyati printed it.
“The businessman still needs to take a printed copy to the passport administration to complete the transaction but in the future that trip would also be eliminated once the government administrations begin accepting documents electronically,” Al-Hakami told Arab News.
At the passport administration, officials scanned the 2-dimensional barcode that contains all the important information about the applicant to decode it and authenticate the information for approval.
“There is a general direction by the government to adopt e-government in order to ease the transaction time and effort for the applicants as well as guarantee security against fraud. We are happy to be the pioneer government administration to implement this new system especially that we receive more than three million applications annually,” said Col. Mohammed Hassan Al-Asmari, deputy general director of passport administration of Makkah region.
He told Arab news that if there was a discrepancy and a suspicion of fraud the police would be immediately informed to investigate the case. He said that the administration’s employees have been trained to use the new system.
“We are aiming to have an automated office and a paperless administration. This is a step toward that. In advanced levels there would be payments through the Internet and I expect that there would be more development in e-business and e-government as technology advances,” said Al-Hakami.
The chamber would be offering workshops to the businessmen on the new system to increase its use.
Autor: Maha Akeel
Quelle: Arab News, 21.09.2005
