Strategy & Action Plan

As mentioned before, users are understood here as individuals (citizens and expatriates), businesses and government agencies. The user-centric vision for Saudi Arabia's e-government initiative is summarized by the following vision statement:

Those objectives are divided as follows:

PROVIDER BETTER SERVICES BY THE END OF 2010

1. Provid the top priority services (150) at world class level of quality electronically
2. Deliver services in a seamless and user friendly way and at highest standars of security
3. Make services available to everyone in the Kingdom and allow 24/7 access from cities as well as countryside and even outside the country
4. Realise 75% asoption rate with respect to the number of users
5. Ensure 80% user satisfaction rating for all services provided electronically

INCREASE INTERNAL EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS

6. Deliver all possible official intra-governmental communication in a paperless way
7. Ensure accessibilty of all information needed across government agencies and storage of information with as little redundancy as possible
8. Purchase all goods and services above a reasonable value threshold throught e-procurement

CONTRIBUE TO COUNTRY;S PROSPERITY

9. Contribute to establishment of information society in the Kingodm throught spreading information, knowledge and use of e-services
10. Help improve use of cpuntry's assets and resources by increasing society's productivity in private, business and public sector

In order to be able to do so, an e-government initiative has to address several issues and has to put into place several components of an e-government framework:

The implementation of improved e-government services will, however, be based on a unified e-government vision, national priorities and shared standards and methodologies identified by the YESSER program with the participation of the government agencies. Further, the coordinated decentralized implementation of the e-government initiative will follow the principle of "Develop once, use many times" as much as possible.

The YESSER program's role in Saudi's e-government initiative is therefore that of an enabler and facilitator: it enables the implementation of individual e-government services by ministries and other government agencies, on the one hand, by building the national infrastructure and defining common standards which these agencies can use; and on the other hand, by providing best practice examples and accompanying implementation of pilot services. Moreover, it will ensure an appropriate level of coordination and collaboration between the implementing agencies.

Following is a description of the components of each type.

The infrastructure projects

The infrastructure projects aim to build a strong, reliable infrastructure that enables the implementation of e-services, national applications and facilitates the data exchange and connectivity between government agencies.

The infrastructure architecture

E-Services projects

Those projects aim to achieve the main objective of e-government; "providing better services".

The following figure shows the pilot services projects (category 1) in some detail

For each of the above-mentioned services:

• The current process has been mapped
• The process has been redesigned to suit their electronic delivery
• The organizational, procedural, technical and financial requirements for implementation have been identified

The pilot services host agencies, with YESSER support, are currently working on the implementation these services in their electronic form.

National application projects

Those projects aim to provide main applications that are shared between all government agencies in order to increase their efficiency and capabilities.

Also, the feedback of individuals and the private sector was taken through opinion surveys. Finally, country benchmark studies have also been conducted.