| Name | Kuwait Transparency Society |
| Industry | Government |
| Name | KANEE Group, CompuCore, Gulf Opinions (KANEE Subsidiary) |
| Industry | IT, Recruitment, Economic Consultancy and Call Center |
| Web |
Power does not only give great opportunities but also brings a huge resposibility. Though modern world seduces the leaders of any level to take personal advantage of their opportunities, governments all over the world strive for the full transparency of their service for the peoples, as their primary mission is to take care of the people and the state.
Since 2005, when the Body of Citizen Service of Kuwait formed Kuwait Transparency Society based on the International Standards, this independent organization has been taking special considerations to measure, evaluate, and improve the level of honesty and accountability of its government agencies. In 2008 one of such steps became the establishment of the Reform Perception Index (RPI) – an indicator that measures the degree of transparency, accountability, honesty, fairness in the government body of Kuwait. Ever since, KTS continued to provide updates based on an annual government-wide survey covering 49 of Kuwait’s government agencies.
In order to measure the Reform Perception Index the Kuwait Transparency Society regularly conducts special surveys for citizens, employees, experts, certain project managers etc. All the participants fill in paper forms, evaluating different parameters of government activities and services.
The scale of the research is nationwide for all the 49 Kuwait’s government agencies: numerous and various groups of citizens (men and women, top managers and regular workers, young specialists and experienced businessmen etc.) evaluated the quality of government services and shared their thoughts and opinions about pros and cons of the exhisting service system.
The forms contain on average 50 positions with 5 degrees of evaluation (poor, non-satisfactory, neutral, satisfactory, and excellent), including open points for comments. There is a huge stratum of information to be processed to measure the RPI.
During several years the data from the papers were manually entered into the calculation system, the process was slow and inaccurate due to human-error factor: too many people were involved into the process. When in doubt, all surveys belonging to a government agency had to be revised and re-entered, as the results were crucial to evaluate and improve the whole government service system. Seeing the global tendency to move to e-government and feeling the urgent need to fasten the decision making, the Kuwait Transparency Society took the decision to automize and improve the quality of the surveys processing.
CompuCore and Gulf Opinions – an expert company in the sphere of document management and an independent polling and statistics research center in Kuwait – undertook the implementation of the report of 2013.
With the help of OCR and ICR technologies – ABBYY FlexiCapture, CompuCore designed the unique machine-readable layout of the paperforms with special structure, reference marks, individual barcodes, checkmark answerfields and fields for handwritten comments etc.
The forms were printed out and commissioned to work. The collected filled in sheets were then processed by the datacapture software: the forms were classified according to their types (depending on who filled it, which government agency’s services were evaluated and so on), the necessary data were extracted and verified according to the pre-set rules (e.g. the system allerted the operator to check for consistency issues like omissions, multiple answers where a single selection is required, etc).
The received data were then exported into the database for further calculation and forming the statistics report. At that stage Gulf Opinions Center for Polls and Statistics provided research services and consulting for the results analysis.
Thanks to ABBYY OCR and ICR technologies and the whole joint turnkey solution for the project of CompuCore and Gulf Opinions, data extraction, that usually used to take more than 3 weeks, this time took only 1 day. That is a very significant time and resource reduction for the whole process of improving transparency level in the government service system. The data were immediately analysed and the results of the RPI for the current year were announced at the annual ceremony in May.
“Undoubtedly, the usage of ICR technology have increased our confidence in the accuracy of the obtained data. Moreover, it removed the burden of revising the outcomes of the manual data entry process. The time required for data capturing was shrunk significantly which came to benefit survey’s analysis stage.”
Salma Al Essa,
Board Member of Kuwait Transparency Society and “Reform Perception Index (RPI)” Commissioner
The Reform Performance Index report was published at the official website of the Kuwait Transparency Society. Kuwait gives high priority to improving government service system and making life of the citizens easier, more comfortable and secure. On the whole it can be said that the delivery of basic services such as education and healthcare is really gradually improving, public bodies are becoming more and more accountable and government financing turns to be more transparent. Positive steps gradually bring Kuwait society to a fully transparent and accountable government, increasing the general standard of life.
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