The Executive Team for Online Services Index (OSI), an indicator of the UAE Vision 2021 National Agenda, held its twenty-sixth meeting, under the slogan “Together towards the first place”. The meeting, which is the first for 2020, was held at TRA Dubai office, headed by H.E. Salem Al Housani, Acting Deputy Director General for Information and e-Government Sector and Head of the National OSI Executive Team, and attended by members of sub-teams representing various local government entities in the UAE.

This meeting aims to review the team’s highlights for 2019, and the level of achievement in standard initiatives. It also included a session for innovation and future foresight.

The meeting started with a presentation made by the head of the national team, in which he reviewed the highlights of last year, including the field visit to Sweden and learning about the Swedish practices in smart cities and digital transformation, the interactive meeting on Twitter, the launch of the One-Character Domain (U.ae) initiative , The National Digital Transformation Report, the launch of the enablement tools for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the Hackathon 2020 Challenges Workshop.

Commenting on this meeting, H.E. Al Housani, said: “Through this meeting, the National OSI Executive Team continues its efforts for achieving the UAE vision 2021. This is an important meeting as it is the first for 2020, which was announced by the wise leadership as the preparation year for the next fifty years “2020: towards the next 50”. The meeting participants were keen on presenting and discussing ideas that would draw a road map for developing smart services in a way that suits the aspirations of our country, our leadership and our people. We have accomplished a lot in the past fifty years, and today we are at the starting lines of a new race that will last for the next fifty years, a race of which we would only be satisfied in achieving the first place. The team meeting today aims to provide future visions to develop our smart services, in order to reach the ultimate goal of these services, which is the happiness of our community members."

H.E. Al Housani added: “During this meeting, we addressed the most important achievements of the team during the past year, and highlighted the level of achievement for each of the standard initiatives that we launched as well as the requirements of the next phase. We focused in the meeting through an innovation and future foresight session on exploring solutions and ideas that serve our aspirations in the smart services sector, in the areas of open data, smart services, e-participation, and the requirements of the United Nations."

The meeting also discussed the challenges that will be posed in the Hackathon 2020 in support of Expo 2020 in the near term and the coming fifty in the long term. During the innovation and future foresight session, the participants explored innovative solutions drawing on creative ways of thinking for a number of challenges related to digital government, such as improving mechanisms for providing digital services to ensure raising people’s happiness and wellbeing, providing open data systems on the portals of the entities and the official UAE portal, activating innovation and future foresight mechanisms, developing digital government services, driving change in government entities to support digital transformation, and ensuring the involvement of all segments of society in decision-making through digital participation.

The OSI Executive Team includes representatives of 11 federal and local government entities, and its priorities are to achieve a sustainable environment, integrated infrastructure and the goals set at the global level. The team works according to the most important global trends in the e-government survey, which is bridging the digital divide, open data, promoting usage, multi-channel services, interconnected government, and e- participation.