Abdullah Basahel

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

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consequence, governments and corporations not only end up using more resources but are also tainted as inefficient and outdated.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 municipalitys 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.

Managing Crowds with Wireless and Mobile Technologies

Thousands of people have lost their lives in stampedes and other crowd related disasters in recent years. Most of these fatalities seem to have been caused by poor control and management of crowds, which is discussed in this article. An efficient and effective crowd management system must also have a plan to deal with the ongoing threat of terrorism and outbreak of various kinds of communicable diseases. In this article, we present a framework of a Crowd Control and Health Management System specially designed to prevent and manage stampedes and other disasters. The system has two subsystems; one for dealing with the management of stampedes and other disasters and the other with healthcare management. As part of the proposed system, an algorithm for an early detection of stampedes, with proof and simulation of implementation, is provided. As part of the healthcare management subsystem, we integrate several mobile applications and develop four of them dealing with relief issues, blood donations, complaints and alerts, and utilizing mobile phones as a sensor device. Our system makes use of various kinds of wireless, mobile, and other technologies and tools including Fog Computing, Smart Phones, Smart Digital Street, IP-Cameras, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Voice Alarm, Light Alarm, and Global Positioning System (GPS). We compare merits and effectiveness of RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as well as those of Cloud and Fog with a view of using them as part of the proposed framework. We also discuss applications of our systems in real-life cases of Hajj, an annual pilgrimage of millions of people to Mecca, and Kumbh Mela, a periodic gathering of tens of millions of people in India, both of which have accounted for the majority of fatalities in stampedes and other disasters.