2016•11•14 Muscat
UNU-EGOV attended the Sultan Qaboos Award for Excellence in e-Government to evaluate innovation in ICT-enabled Public Service Delivery
The Sultan Qaboos Awards for Excellence in e-Government have, since 2010, encouraged Omani authorities to use Information Communication Technology (ICT) to enhance their performance and to improve the quality of public service delivery. The aim is to utilise the potential of ICT to simplify procedures, cut costs and improve the effectiveness and value of government services to citizens and businesses. The awards ceremony acknowledges and rewards excellence and innovation in the field of offering online service provision. It also promotes Oman’s policies to move to a diversified and sustainable economy based on information technology with the associated economic and social benefits for the Omani society.
With more than a decade of work in the field of e-Government and ICT, UNU-EGOV Academic Fellow and researcher at the Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia) Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen was invited, together with Elsa Estevez, Adjunct Professor at the National University of the South (Argentina), to partake in the evaluation of the 2016 edition of the Sultan Qaboos Award for Excellence in e-Government, which took place in Muscat, Oman. The Jury Committee of 13 jury members was chaired by Dr. Teresa Pardo, Director of the Center for Technology in Government (CTG). The evaluation was based on international standards and to ensure contextual knowledge, two Omani experts were part of the jury.
With 38 public and private entities contesting the awards and with categories such as best public and private sector online and mobile services, whole-of-government, transformation, innovation, accessibility, public engagement, transparency and actual impact, the focus of the Awards touch on a number of UNU-EGOV core areas of expertise. Examples of this match includes current projects on ICT-enabled and Context-Specific Public Service Delivery and Administrative Burden Reduction, but also capacity development for policy and project implementations as those carried out by UNU-EGOV in the PASP PALOP-TL countries, Colombia and Uganda for increased accessibility.