Malta was highlighted as a leading digital government case study at the Commonwealth Local Government Conference at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta.

Addressing 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, safe and secure cloud computing, the 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.

“At this conference, the Commonwealth Local Government Forum 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 accelerate operational transformation, improve citizen engagement, and increase innovation and economic opportunity. In fact, we are pleased to an­nounce that our long-standing association with the Malta Information Technology Agency (Mita) has been included as a key case study in this handbook,” said David 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 Mr 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 collaboration bet­ween Mita, the government’s specialised 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 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,” said Mr Sultana.

“In order to deliver greater productivity and improvement of 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, Mr Burrows referred to 15 of Microsoft CityNext’s most interesting case studies in Commonwealth countries.

In addition to the Malta case, the others included examples 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 the 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.

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