E-Portals are Valuable Productivity Multipliers, Important Shortfalls in the Safeer System in KSA and Proposed Possible Solutions for Them

Abstract

E-portal systems play a big role in various countries. They can be deployed by governments and organizations to provide information for citizens and customers and serve their transactions. Consequently, e-portals can be considered as systems that increase productivity of staffs and offer more reliable services. However, many issues have to be solved, such as: privacy and security, performance, reliability, effectiveness, and documents integrity and archiving. We postulate that once the knowhow is acquired for designing and developing one e-portal system, it then becomes readily conducted and adopted by others. In this work, we examine one such e-portal system that is the Safeer system that was designed and developed for the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). We believe that this e-portal system could be reconfigured to serve other sectors, such as agriculture, export and import, fisheries, etc. However, before such reconfigurable deployments is possible, it is necessary first to address the shortfalls and gaps that exist in it and could hinder its deployment for other applications. Accordingly, we have examined the Safeer system and identified a possible set of gaps and shortfalls in it. Of these, we have isolated the most three important shortfalls and proposed possible solutions for them. The three shortfalls are: the study plan or the scheduling, the lacking of integrated email server and services, and the lacking of effective integrated archiving system. We believe that the proposed solutions augment the Safeer portal with additional capabilities, and improve its performance, effectiveness, security and privacy, and data and documents integrity; hence, MOHE would be able to license or sell this product. Moreover, we are confident that this work may be of benefit to others in-charge of planning and discharging e-services to their clients. Finally, we conclude this work and establish a set of possible future directions.