Government organization for a Middle Eastern country serves 2M+ citizens with their HCL Volt MX mobile app

Easy Mobile Access to Government Services

Since it was first formed in 1970, this government services organization for a Middle Eastern country put into place functions and missions that provided peace and security to its citizen. This included organizing a police force to guarantee the protection of national security and safety, such as taking care of nationality-related affairs, issuing travel documents, organizing expatriates’ entry to the country, and organizing the prison.

For years, they helped citizens, but they operated as a “paper-based” organization. It was time to modernize and become efficient!

They wanted to provide a high-tech yet easy-to-use, modern way to offer electronic and integrated government services to its citizens.

A key part of their strategy was to offer services to the citizens around the clock, instead of just during business hours, which was how they were operating. Further, the services needed to be provided in multiple languages.

Next, they needed to choose an application development platform that would allow them to easily build, test and deploy an app, and it was also critically important for security and privacy to be built in. The app needed to meet stringent government security standards.

HCL Volt MX was the low-code, app-dev platform they selected to achieve their goal.

Volt MX: The Low-Code Platform of Choice

They had several requirements for their new application and system infrastructure that they thought were necessary to foster adoption and allow the organization to retire their old ways of working.

The system needed to be secure, performant, reliable, available, scalable and feature-rich.

As a result, the system infrastructure they put into place includes:

• Data and connection tunnel encryption for all requests to ensure privacy and security
• Firewall protection of their internal networks with multiple security levels built-in, for additional protection against hacks
• Adherence to the OWASP checklist items for mobile app security
• Two entry points into the system: a main and support production environment, plus a backup environment to ensure high availability and service continuity
• The latest high-tech machines to ensure high performance, with multiple machines in place to manage load-balancing to ensure reliability/availability
• An eService system that allows new features to be added dynamically

And with a solid and secure infrastructure in place, they confidently deployed their Volt MX mobile app. The app is a smart application designed and developed to be the government organization’s high-tech service delivery channel for smartphones and services. Through the app citizens now have access to:

• Over 160 services, supported in 6 languages
• Official government documents
• Visa services, such as extending or renewing visa
• ”Smart services” that do the requested work automatically without need for further user intervention
• A menu of logically categorized services for easy navigation
• A ‘Favorites’ list for frequently used services for quick access
• Services to pay and acquire individual or company permits
• Settle traffic violations
• Renew residency for expatriates
• Pay any outstanding fees/fines with credit card and bank-to-bank transfer support
• Setup postal delivery of government documents to a citizens home so they don’t need to travel to the business office.
• Automatic fixes, where all transactions are scanned and if an error is detected it reverts the operation and refunds the payment. Reduces customer support calls.
• Push notifications that announce new services as they are added.
• The app’s ability to predict what the users wants to do and execute those steps automatically to assist. The overarching goal is to achieve full operation execution with ”one click”

A Strategy for Continuous Improvement

The organization is proud of the success they are having with their Volt MX application. In fact, it is highly rated in the Apple AppStore and Google play with ratings of 4.2 and 4.5 , respectively. The number of subscribers increases daily and the development is continuing to add more capabilities, with almost two dozen more services being developed and additional languages are to be supported!

They attribute much of their app success to having a dedicated team that reviews all transactions and feedback from users to gain insight on enhancements and fixes needed and then works them into the app. This aligns with their mission and fosters an operational mode of continuous improvement to keep citizens happy and productive.

There is no end in sight for the enhancements in plan for this application.