promotes innovation by creating new technological initiatives to help the Sultanate achieve the transformation to a digital society as envisioned in Vision 2020. According to Ahmed bin Nasser Al Rahbi, Director of the ISC, “The centre’s key objective is to rely fully on Omani youths to set up a world-class Omani technical support center. Good examples of the success of the ISC are Omanis who have excellent training and broad working experience. The center has an all Omani 13-member team who amongst them have 44 IT certifications in various Microsoft products. The engineers are still working to obtain various other certifications in order to strengthen and enhance its human and technical skills and capabilities.”
Since 2007, the center has provided quality integrated support and IT solutions to Government bodies through customer-friendly ethos, while training young Omani professionals to become proactive participants in the Sultanate’s digital society.
The ISC is another important initiative of the ITA for the development of information technology in the Sultanate and build Omani talent equipped with cutting edge knowledge in IT. Road towards Privatization The ITA seeks to improve the standard of IT services in the Sultanate and in order to achieve this goal the Authority has encouraged local companies to strengthen their capability in the domestic market. The success of the ISC in providing support services to high-level Government bodies was the reason behind the decision of the ITA to transform the center to a business unit and privatize it to enhance the level of competition in the market. This move is expected to improve the quality of the services in the private sector because of the new competition.
Talking about the steps taken by the ITA towards privatisation, Ahmed Al Rahbi, said, “The ITA has entrusted some of the leading global consulting firms with the task of studying and evaluating the possibility of privatising the center, and developing a roadmap for the proposed privatisation programme. The study has been completed and some practical steps have been taken to implement the programme. An extremely important factor to note is that since its inception, the center has already been working in a semi-commercial environment. This has made the process of transformation comparatively easy.”
ICT SULTANATE OF OMAN 2011-12