E-Governance in Developing World: Design of BPR Model for Makkah Municipality eServices

Abstract

Adoption and implementation of e-services and e-Government in many organisations of the developing countries continues to be in silos, resulting in duplication of processes within the same divisions and sometimes in the constituent departments. In fact, some of the enterprises in developing countries either have no electronic processing at all or typically carry it out in a highly unorganized and unplanned manner, depriving themselves of the BPR benefits. As a consequence, governments and corporations not only end up using more resources but are also tainted as inefficient and outdated. However, there are some organisations which are successfully transforming their processing with the power of BPR. An example of such organisation is the Makkah (Mecca) municipality which is responsible for granting various kinds of licenses for the purposes of carrying out construction, running shops, provision of professional services, investment, health safety and street digging for various utility lines, to list a few. The licenses for dozens of these and other services are issued by several branches of the Makkah municipality. Based on the design of authors, a reengineered centralized system has been implemented by a number of services in Makkah municipality, whereas other services are still using the legacy systems. The aim of this paper is to describe the design of the new system and its benefits to the Makkah municipality's eLicencing services. The models presented in this paper can be applied in cases of other similar organizations, not only in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia but across the entire Middle East in particular, and the developing countries in general.