The Recruitment through SMS Applications system of the Royal Court Affairs wins the World Summit Award for e-government

The Recruitment Solution through SMS Applications from the Royal Court Affairs (RCA) has won the prestigious World Summit Award in the e-government category this year. Oman has won the coveted award among over 700 projects from 168 countries across the globe in the World Summit Award 2009. This innovative solution has also won the best e-content in the Arab region in the e-government category at the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2009 under the WSA program. This novel solution uses mobile technology and an integrated system between two the RCA and the Ministry of Manpower to enable Omani citizens to apply for job advertisements by sending an SMS and get the first response within seconds. The World Summit Award is instituted as part of the initiatives under the World Summit for Information Society as a means to recognise creativity in digital content and enhance the quality of electronic contents and widen its reach for the common benefit of the world society as a whole. The final award ceremony to honour excellence in multimedia and e-Content creation will be held on the 12th June 2009 in Mexico, USA. All the 40 winning entries in 8 different categories will be present at this grand finale event and receive their awards. The Winners’ teams are invited to personally receive their certificate and trophy amidst dignitaries from the government, private sector and the United Nations. HE.Sultan Mohammed Al Namani, Secretary General, Royal Court Affairs expressed his delight by stating that, “The Royal Court Affairs winning the World Summit Award in the e-government category is in line with His majesty’s vision for excellence in using technology to deliver public service. This award is also a big recognition for the hard work put in by our team of staff in cooperation with the Ministry of Manpower. We express our sincere thanks to ministry of manpower and the staff of RCA, and we look forward to many more such international honours for their efforts.” The Electronic Evaluation System is an innovative approach utilising the Ministry of Manpower systems to cross-match applications that are submitted for vacancies at the Royal Court Affairs with least manual intervention and effort. This solution has stood out in the e-government category as a winning entry because of effective utilisation of existing infrastructure to enable efficiency in service delivery. The new system has reduced the process cycle time to 5-10seconds and brought down the cost of processing to only 10Baiza through automated sorting of applications. In addition the solution also helps the Ministry of Manpower to maintain information accuracy and promote transparency in the recruitment process ensuring equal opportunity for all. Dr. Salim Al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA congratulated the entire team behind this technical solution for winning this prestigious award and said, “I am glad for Oman winning this unique worldwide honour. The achievement of this international award for the ‘Recruitment through Mobile SMS’ is an important recognition and a very good motivation to promote e-government services for the realisation of His Majesty’s vision through the implementation of the eOman strategy. The success of this national IT strategy depends on how the use of technology can benefit the citizen by offering high quality services at their convenience. The worldwide recognition also encourages the efforts made by the team in developing and offering world-class solution for e-government. We are proud of this unique accomplishment and we thank the Royal Court Affairs for their cooperation and efforts in achieving these honours. We also hope that this will motivate other organisations in harnessing technology for offering public services in competitive manner.” The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005, linked Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with human development and called on Member States to build a global “inclusive, people-centred and development-oriented information society” through the sharing of information and knowledge. In line with this mission an International digital content competition was organised under the title ‘World Summit Awards’ (WSA). WSA is a worldwide initiative run by a non-profit group to select and promote the world's best e-Content and innovative ICT applications. WSA was started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as a contribution of the Austrian Government to make a global effort to bridge the digital divide and close the content gap. Over 100 countries are actively involved in this award and around 700 nominations were made for the WSA 2007. The WSA has been held every two years in 2003, 2005 and 2007 and the current session of the WSA 2009 is on. The two-year duration permits holding content-focused national and international conferences with exhibitions and the WSA road shows to promote the winning entries wider. The activities of WSA and its global networking are coordinated by the WSA Office at the International Center for New Media (ICNM). ICNM is an independent non-profit organisation chartered in Austria. It aims to promote innovation and creativity in multimedia and Internet by means of best practice selection and showcasing. The award focuses on quality digital content as the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies has an economic and social impact worldwide. Digital technologies enable pictures, text and multimedia data are sent and received faster, more target-orientated, anywhere around the globe. At the same time, there is need to recognise good contents and quality applications out of the information tsunami online. This quality ensures that they can be reached effortlessly and have a profound impact on larger sections of the community. So the award recognises of those who design and develop quality content with creative imagination and sound technical know how. A focus on technology at the expense of content clearly results in content gap which also increases the digital divide between those who can benefit from online content/services and those cannot. Nasser Al Badri, Head of Recruitment and Omanisation Office at the Royal Court Affairs, described the award winning solution as follows: “The solution is to perform first short listing operation of the job applicant by integrating the RCA application program, the Ministry of Manpower (MoMP) registration system and Mobile Phone technology. Applicants can apply for RCA vacancies by sending an SMS with the MoMP registration code and their preferred Job Code. A mediator system will fetch the applicant details from the MoMP and the job requirements from office of recruitment in RCA. Next, it matches the codes between the registrant and the job and if successful, then the candidate is shortlisted. The system will also check any further requirements like Area, Driving License, Qualification, Specialisation, Experience, occupational experience, Training requirements of the candidates with details of the applied candidate. If the candidate does not satisfy any of the above conditions then the candidate’s application will be rejected and an SMS will be sent to the candidate with valid reason as to why the candidate is rejected. Once the candidate satisfies all the requirement of the applied job then the candidate is validated and a registration number is generated. A message will be sent with this registration number along with a congratulatory message. Through this project Omani citizens have been greatly benefitted because now they can seek jobs that befit their qualifications and can edit their applications and reapply with the same registered details from anywhere through an SMS without having to travel to ministry office.” Commenting on her role as the National expert for Oman, Mrs. Zawan Al Sabti of ITA said, “I am honoured to serve my role for the WSA with the support of ITA and other government organizations. I am fortunate to be selected as one of 32 jurors to evaluate best contents from the globe for the second time and it is my responsibility to nominate best e-content application from the Sultanate of Oman in the WSA”. E-Content products or ICT applications enter into the WSA through national level e-content contests. The national winners can then be nominated for the international WSA in the eight categories that have established based on the social impact in every-day life of world citizen. People from everywhere and every walk of life must have affordable access to quality e-Contents and applications in Health, politics, business, science, education, culture, and entertainment to improve their knowledge as well as life style. E-Government & Institutions, e-Health & Environment, e-Learning & Education, e-Entertainment & Games, e-Culture & Heritage, e-Science & Technology, e-Business & Commerce and e-Inclusion & Participation are the 8 official categories for nominations. The Sultanate of Oman has made yet another mark in the international arena by winning in this year’s World Summit Award and the earlier honour came from the Higher Education Admission System winning a similar award in the e-content category in theWSA2008. It is evident that the progress made by Oman in offering effective e-government solution through a strategic vision has been recognised at global level.

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National implementation:

Completed from 28 Apr 2009 to 28 Apr 2009

Oman's Royal Court Affairs (RCA)

* The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development
* Information and communication infrastructure
* ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life
      * E-government
         * E-government strategies
         * E-government systems

• Publication