The United Arab Emirate’s Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced that Dubai has become the world’s first government to turn 100 per cent paperless. He highlighted the savings of 1.3 billion Dirham (US $350 million) and 14-million-man hours due to digital operations.
A comprehensive digital government services platform manages all the internal and external transactions and procedures of the Government of Dubai making it completely paperless.
The Crown Prince, in a statement said, “The achievement of this target marks the beginning of a new stage in Dubai’s journey to digitise life in all its aspects – a journey rooted in innovation, creativity, and a focus on the future.” Reinforcing the status of world-leading digital capital, the achievement of becoming 100 per cent paperless poses Dubai as a role model in designing government operations and services that are citizen-centric and enhance customer experience, he added.
Sheikh Hamdan mentioned that the Government of Dubai is planning to implement advanced strategies in the next five years to create and optimise digital life in the city.
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The Government of Dubai implemented the paperless strategy in five phases. Each of the phases enlcompassed a different group of the government’s entities. By the end of the fifth phase, all the 45 government entities were covered under the startegy. These entities provide over 1,800 digital services and more than 10,500 key transactions.
As per the statement, the entities’ collaboration and integration enabled the automation of processes and services extended to customers. This brought down paper consumption by over 336 million papers. Further, digitalisation will also help provide exceptional experiences for residents through the DubaiNow application, which allows access to over 130 smart city services in 12 major categories, the statement added.
The developed countries including the US, UK, Canada, and countries in Europe are looking forward to digitalisation of their government operations on a large scale. On the contrary, critics have raised alerts on vulnerability of digital assets, operations and data to cyberattacks.