The plan is part of the Smart Government initiative launched by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, that will see all government-related services offered on mobile phones by mid-2015.

Work on the mega transformation project has begun and the services will be released in five phases until May 2015.

RTA recently updated its mobile app by adding nine services to the existing 23, taking the number of existing RTA mobile services to 32.

Among the newly added services are practice theory test for driving licence applicants, water taxi booking, school NOC status inquiry, a new complaints channel called Al Hares, elderly parking permit application and renewal, special needs parking permit application as well as information about latest tenders.

According to Ahmad Hashem Behroozian, CEO of RTA’s Licensing Agency, new services will be added to RTA mobile apps every month, leading to 200 services by mid- 2015.

“We have started the process already and we updated our app with nine new services and by the middle of next year we plan to add more services in five phases. Rather than just having these services online, our idea is to make it easy for people to use these services. It is a huge task and it calls for coordination and cooperation between various departments and other authorities, but we have the necessary infrastructure to do the job,” said Behroozian, who is leading the efforts of transformation.

Interestingly, RTA is planning to involve students from local as well as foreign universities in designing the applications, while also recruiting the services of international experts.

“We are in touch with various universities and currently we are in the process of signing contracts with them. Around 50 to 60 students will be joining us to design the project as well during testing. We will get ideas from the students on what features need to be added to applications and what services are high demand,” added Behroozian.

He said that once the project is live RTA will have more than one app across four mobile platforms - iOS, android, Windows and BlackBerry.

“RTA has a huge chunk of services, probably the most services by a single government department, and getting all those on a single application is not possible. We will have multiple apps offering different services. We will also have a smart mobile website and for those services that cannot be offered on applications customers will be directed to the mobile site,” said Behroozian.

The mobile services will includ, vehicle registration and renewal, which are now available online and through call centre, as well as driving licence renewal, parking card applications, fine payments, etc.