Naveed Ahmed

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Technology Board (KPITB) is assisting the provincial government in performing efficient operations and improving public services. With the utilisation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the KPITB, the government can enhance digital literacy of its workforce and efficiency in government operations. Officials will benefit from reduced management and time costs due to efficient government operations.

Ahmed Hassan, Marketing Officer at the KPITB, told WealthPK that a memorandum of understanding (MoU) has been signed between the AWS and the KPITB to facilitate the operations of the KP government. The AWS will provide its cloud services to the provincial government, which will help manage big data sets and records. This initiative will reduce the government operation time and management costs and make them efficient.

Furthermore, it will be possible for government employees to access official data from anywhere by utilising the AWS cloud storage services. The KP provincial government already operates different projects to provide convenience to the general public. The official said the AWS services would also manage the "citizen facilitation project" data. This project will consolidate 66 government services under one roof, including revenue, vehicle licences, challans, and arms licences.

The official said the ongoing digital transformation is helping to drive KP and the broader Pakistan economy. As a result, this initiative will require a digital workforce equipped with digital skills to meet the requirements for utilising cloud services.While talking about the training of government officials in using services provided by the AWS, Hassan said the KPITB already has its training mechanism. They have already trained thousands of students in various digital programs.

The KPITB will utilise the same tools to train the government employees on a large scale for quick implementation of efficient government services throughout the province. Through coursework and hands-on labs, officials can use real-world scenarios to gain technical skills they need to manage cloud roles facilitated by the AWS.

He said that after signing the MoU with the AWS, the next step is the planning phase in which the government plans for official implementation of AWS services into the current government setup. According to the MoU, the KPITB will collaborate with the government agencies and AWS to identify pilot workloads that potentially profit from the AWS services, and educate the agencies about the benefits and possibilities of employing cloud technology.

This way, the employees can take advantage of the most advanced services, including analytics, computing, databases, the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, mobile and storage services, and other cloud technologies for government operations. According to the official, in addition to making it possible for government organisations to provide new citizen services more rapidly and cheaply, this initiative will stimulate experimentation with novel ideas inside the KP government.

The AWS services would help the KPITB and other government agencies to strengthen their current IT infrastructure and reliable platform suitable for innovation. Following the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Digital Policy 2018-23, the KP government aims to digitalise the province so that citizens can receive better and faster government services.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk