Microsoft highlights Malta’s eGovernment as a Microsoft CityNext case study

Malta was highlighted as a leading Digital Government case study at the Commonwealth Local Government Conference taking place this week at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta.

Addressing the delegates in his keynote speech, David Burrows, managing director International Organisations, WorldWide Industry at Microsoft referred to Microsoft CityNext, a global initiative that puts the power of Microsoft’s Partner Network, its technology, its safe and secure cloud computing, the successful educational and entrepreneurial programmes and its 30 years of experience in empowering regions, cities and municipalities worldwide at the service of governments and regions across the world. Microsoft is the sponsoring Technology Partner for the bi-annual Commonwealth Local Government Conference.

“At this conference, CLGF are launching a handbook in which we share some of our customers’ experiences and illustrate the ways in which Microsoft CityNext is helping communities around the world to accelerate operational transformation, improve citizen engagement and increase innovation and economic opportunity. In fact, we are pleased to announce that our longstanding association with Mita in Malta has been included as a key case study within this handbook,” said Burrows in his keynote address.

“Through our Microsoft CityNext programme, we are empowering city, municipal, local and regional governments to become safer, healthier, more caring, better educated and more sustainable places to live and work – by helping mayors, governors and departmental leaders embrace the transformative power of digital technology and the cloud. Through our technology, we are helping them understand how their organisational systems are performing today and giving them insights into how to improve the services for tomorrow’s citizens and businesses,” continued Burrows.

“Malta is a leading Commonwealth country where the majority of public services are available online. This leadership position is one based on years of collaboraton between Microsoft and the Malta Information Technology Agency, which is government’s special IT agency that delivers policy and digital services to its citizens. We are now strengthening our engagement with Mita via a further digital transformation strategy where the agency will exploit the full power of the Microsoft platform to help Maltese citizens and businesses,” said Kevin Schembri, Enterprise & Public Sector lead at Microsoft Malta.

Mita’s executive chairman Tony Sultana said that the secret to understanding this next chapter in the Mita-Microsoft story is about real engagement between Mita and Microsoft.

“We’ve been a Microsoft partner for many years, but this is a whole new level of engagement. We need the best tools so we can achieve what we want to, and have embarked on a number of projects we deem mission-critical for our future. Our citizens demand the best in terms of e-government and we think our solid partnership with Microsoft is the most practical way we can see to make good on that promise. We see the latest Microsoft technology as a key enabler of our approach to better support, engage with government staff, improve internal efficiency and offer better digital information services to our fellow citizens and users,” Sultana said.

“In order to deliver greater pro- ductivity and improvement of Maltese governmental internal operations as part of this digital transformation vision, a number of other key Microsoft technologies are being rolled out. In fact, the immediate next step in our digital journey will be opening more services to mobile, with even more use of both hybrid and public cloud,” he added.

During his keynote speech, Burrows referred to 15 of Microsoft CityNext’s most interesting case studies in Commonwealth countries. In additon to the Malta case, the others included excamples of skills-matching and payments solution helping 128 million local labourers find work in India, supporting local government associations by creating value for member councils in Queensland, Australia, how Microsoft Azure is meeting disaster recovery requirements of Impendle Municipality in South Africa, how a partnership between Microsoft and Transport for London are keeping a city on the move, how Canadian cities are adding automated services to save money with cloud solutions and how Microsoft is turning Singapore into a smart city state.