ArRiyadh Development Authority Centralizes Expansive Volume of Enterprise Data to Facilitate Better and More Transparent Urban Planning and Development
 
 

ArRiyadh Development Authority Centralizes Expansive Volume of Enterprise Data to Facilitate Better and More Transparent Urban Planning and Development

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ArRiyadh Development Authority (ADA) is responsible for the socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental development of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city. It devises plans and procedures to improve the standard of services and facilities provided for Riyadh’s residents.

Situated in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, Riyadh is the largest city in Saudi Arabia and the urban center of a region with a population of nearly 7 million citizens. The city is divided into 15 municipal districts, all managed by Riyadh Municipality, which is led by the mayor of Riyadh and ADA.

ADA is committed to ensuring that it digitally records, stores, and manages all data and documents relating to urban renewal, construction projects, long-term city development, and other core and associated activities. Today, using Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle WebCenter Portal, ADA maintains each electronic transaction and paper-based record in a central management solution. This process ensures total transparency and easy collaboration between departments and other development authorities, making ADA more accountable and making operational practices more intuitive and simple. ADA worked with Oracle Partner Advanced Operation Technology on the implementation.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from ArRiyadh Development Authority

  • “Since deploying Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle WebCenter Suite, we have seen rapid improvements in our ability to manage data and documents effortlessly and ensure the smooth daily operations of urban planning. At the same time, we have empowered each department to manage and report on projects with a high level of transparency.” – Majed Al Sultan, Applications Development Manager, ArRiyadh Development Authority

  • Create a centralized enterprise content management system to serve as a complete repository of digitized data and documents for urban planning and development, making data transparent and accessible to authorized departments across ADA and facilitating standardized business process management
  • Ensure varying levels of data security and access, complying with existing internal practices and Saudi Arabian government regulatory requirements while establishing an integrated approach to capturing, storing, managing, and maintaining documents
  • Increase transparency and efficiency in planning and scheduling of all urban projects to improve organizational productivity and enable senior management to view up-to-date project status information
  • Reduce error rates of manual data management processes
  • Enable transparent, secure, and centralized control of more than 25 terabytes of urban development data, including multimedia, drawings, and reports, currently expanding by 20% each year

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle Universal Content Management to provide ADA with a unified repository to house unstructured content accessible to users in recognizable formats and within the context of ADA’s familiar applications and working practices
  • Ensured end-to-end content lifecycle management of all ADA data and digital documents from creation to archive
  • Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to deliver a single source of truth for all city and regional projects, streamlining business processes and ensuring rapid access to information
  • Enabled ADA to maintain consistent policies and services regarding system and content back-up and recovery, document retention, security, and system maintenance
  • Appointed local Oracle Partner Advanced Operations Technology to facilitate a smooth rollout of all Oracle technology to more than 400 end users across the ADA enterprise
  • Provided tailored training workshops, seminars, and business user-specific Oracle product training through Advanced Operations Technology
  • Implemented digital signature technology, improving consistency and audit-ability while ensuring compliance with ADA’s existing business policies and government regulations, ultimately safe-guarding content as well as ADA’s reputation
  • Initiated digitization of a backlog of physical paper files in various sizes to ultimately create an online, widely accessible archive managed through a central repository
  • Supported digital asset management (DAM)  by handling a photography and video library that includes more than 300,000 high-resolution images and more than 1,000 high-definition videos, each of the latter averaging at least 200 gigabytes per file
  • Ensured secure digital storage of all documents with central access via a Web portal, rather than having documents spread across an unidentifiable and inherently less secure array of user desktops and filing cabinets
  • Enabled development teams to quickly identify web site content for arriyadh.com and ada.gov.sa in the central repository and publish it seamlessly using sophisticated content management tools, instead of searching for unstructured data on personal desktops and in paper documents

Why Oracle

ADA chose Oracle after a thorough supplier selection process, which began by using Gartner reports to identify the top content management suppliers (Oracle, Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, and SharePoint). The authority then went through a four-phase process that included a detailed functional analysis comparison between the various vendors’ products and used a weighted-point system to evaluate the products based on ADA’s current and future needs.

In phase one, ADA requested the technical and financial proposals from all the vendors. In phase two, ADA evaluated each technical proposal to confirm its conformance to ADA requirements stated in the request for proposals (RFP), and based on the evaluation ADA shortlisted for vendors. Then, in phase three, ADA opened the financial proposal from the shortlisted vendors. Finally, in phase four, ADA evaluated the financial proposals to identify the vendor with the best proposition. Ultimately, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Portal, and Oracle partner Advanced Operations Technology came out on top.

Implementation Process

ADA completed the Oracle deployment in conjunction with Advanced Operations Technology. Continuing its methodical staged approach from the product selection process, ADA also divided the actual project implementation into phases, as it does for all implementations:

  • Requirements Gathered and Validated: In this phase, ADA gathered the requirements for the project and identified the modules each department required. These stipulated requirements included: content management, project management, collaboration, intranet portal, Web sites, secure enterprise search, correspondence, business processes, and other niche components.
  • Solution Design: Using these requirements, ADA built a solution design that also included a security architecture for accessing the different types of content, the content layout and classification, the portal services architecture, the business processes themselves, and Web layout and services.
While ADA established a “line-in-the-sand” to evaluate success of the Oracle implementation, the not-for-profit nature of the authority coupled with the early stage in the use of the technology means there are currently no plans to discern a return on investment metric. Instead, ADA measures success through “happier departments and happier people.”

Partner

Advanced Operations Technology  is a trusted regional Oracle Partner and a one-stop-shop IT services company offering IT consulting, IT infrastructure management, IT security solutions, enterprise application solutions, system integration, as well as outsourcing to help regional companies harness IT to drive operational cost efficiency as well as business growth.

Before starting implementation, Advanced Operations Technology performed a comprehensive analysis of ArRiyadh Development Authority’s requirements. During deployment, it customized the Oracle solution to fit these needs precisely.

The Oracle implementation represents a significant culture change for ADA, and it’s important that employees understand the new system. To help facilitate this, and ensure the move to the new system is as painless as possible, Advanced Operations Technology is providing training services for key employees.