Page 45 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

Continuous improvement through enhancements: ESS implementation is not a one-time activity but rather a
continuous journey for adapting to the changing needs of customers and the environment in general through
enhancements. These enhancements may take the form of new ESS features, business requirements, etc. or
they may cause issues related to ESS core processes. ESS enhancements include upgrades, new releases,
integrations with core systems (legacy systems), government policy changes, implementation of new
government laws and amendments. Over time ESS core processes were always revised and streamlined.
Some examples of this include:
(i) introducing formal customer management;

(ii) streamlining service monitoring and delivery processes to achieve high availability rates;
(iii) streamlining customer support and incident management processes;
(iv) promoting the delivery of services through SLAs (service level agreements);
(v) conducting customer surveys;
(vi) integrating customer survey results with customer management processes;
In view of these examples, it is pertinent to achieve some flexibility and agility in ESS implementations and
core processes to incorporate changing needs and requirements.
Boosting the skills of staff: ESS are ICT based services in nature. Even though technology has been a very
strong enabler, it also poses challenges from a management perspective. Technology tends to change very
frequently and technology related processes also need to be revised and re-implemented to cope with
changing customer needs and innovations.
Technology product timelines are fairly short (becoming even shorter over time) and new versions of
products are released very frequently. Similarly, new technology and service management processes are
formulated quite regularly. Keeping up with these changes is definitely challenging. These are very rapid
cycles requiring agility and flexibility in terms of implementation and requisite skills.
This necessitates quickly learning and adapting to these changes. Hence, it is important to invest in people
skills and to keep their knowledge up-to-date. Technology management and ESS operational processes are
definitely critical. Investing in training and staff development to cope with these rapid changes is essential.
Hiding the Operational Complexity of ESS from Customers: ESS delivery is a fairly complex operation involving
complicated infrastructure management processes, intricate service implementations and customer
management processes as briefly outlined in this document. It is important to hide this complexity from
customers and provide simple, easy-to-use, cloud based, web applications and services with timely and
responsive customer support in a seamless manner. This approach has definitely contributed to the high
adoption of ESS by the customers. Customers are intentionally kept at the user level. They are engaged to
gather their ESS requirements but are kept detached from all the technical intricacies and details of
implementing and delivering services. This has helped customers to save time and money and has also
contributed to increasing their loyalty.
Private Sector Partnerships: ESS require various disparate skills and competences. It was decided early on to
acquire and develop some of these skills internally (organically).Subsequently, several of these requisite skills
and competences were acquired through partnerships established over time. In some cases, strategic
outsourcing was utilized to complement the existing skills. ICT partnerships were also established with
various providers of ICT services and equipment. Without these partnerships, operational challenges and
skills issues might have potentially undermined the success of ESS.

2.3 Results

Benefits and the Impact
The benefits and the impact of whole-of-the-government approach implemented through ESS can be
summarized as follows:
• One-Stop-Shop for Public Services: ESS included several one-stop-shop services for public and
businesses. Examples include the following:
(i) Dubai Government main portal and DubaiNow mobile app for government services related
information and transactions;

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