Case Study Of Uae National Id Program

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction to the Case:

There are several countries around the globe who have implemented or under the process of implementation of National ID projects. There are many objectives of this project as it helps in improving the authentication and identification mechanisms in order to tackle combat terrorism, to reduce crime, control of immigration, to reduce the chances of fraud and to give better services to legal immigrants and citizens of the country (Clarke, 1992). This national ID project is perceived to be much complex in its nature and high level of risk is involved in it. For the successful implementation of such programs, high level of knowledge and expertise are required (Goldman, 2004; Matthews, 2002). From last two or three decades, United Arab Emirates (UAE) has witnessed a massive growth and development in every sector such as health, economy, real estate, businesses, education, security and immigration (Dhaheri, 2011). The government of UAE has expressed strong interest in enhancing the performance of public departments. There is immense need of improving the efficiency of these state departments. There is also the need for efficient co-ordination between state departments and general public so that the citizen can have easy access to public services. For all these reasons, the government initiated this "National ID Project" in June 2003. The main objective behind this project was to develop a state of art and modern identity management system (Dhaheri, 2011).

Objectives of the Project:

Initially, the project had two strategic goals which were addressing economical and security requirements. The project was aimed to provide an integrated population register to the government which would be able to help in reducing the identity theft of the citizens. This can also allow the government to have an easy approach for the population identification and service delivery.

Figure 1. Strategic Goals of Project

The project can become a trusted source of identity verification and also for the security of the country with the help of applying the necessary technology. Figure 1 shows the two strategic objectives of the project. The other objective besides security is the support to government’s economy. The government authorities had the purpose of building the infrastructure of e-authentication which would assist the government in order to give better services and successful e-commerce initiatives. The government has also the objective of unifying all the other cards such as driving license, health card and labor card with one identification card. The objectives of the project were well defined and attainable.

Key Operations of the Project:

The process of the whole project is equipped with the latest technologies available. This was designed as a 4-tier web based architecture. This project was aimed to follow the latest industry standards such as, ISO 17799 for IS security policy, ICAO for card design and x.509 for PKI (Clark, 2012). The system is designed to get highest level of security with the help of secured connection and communication by using Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology. This system was designed to perform three primary operations which are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Primary Operations of Project

At the first stage of the process, the officials have the objective to register population and maintaining the record as a register for every legal resident and citizen of the state. Every individual has unique identification number. The system has the capacity to maintain the record of five million individuals. This record has all the information such as divorces, marriages, deaths and births. The system has also the capacity to update the records on regular basis for the information such as employer, education and address. The system was designed in such a way that it can store the images of official documents presented during the process of registration.

The operation related to the production of National ID cards constitutes the sub-operations such as the processing of enrollment, production and delivery of the ID cards. This operation also deals with the re-issuance of expired, damaged, stolen and lost ID cards. All of the ID cards produced under the National ID card project include the authentication enabled by biometric fingerprint system (WAM, 2012). The new system of national identification is equipped with the complete range of biometric functionalities such as palm and fingerprints. This may also enable the legislative authorities for crime linking and solving services.

Enrolment and Implementation Strategy for Project:

The whole project was planned to implement in three main phases which are also depicted in figure 3.

Figure 3. Implementation and Enrollment Plan

The implementation and enrolment stage started with the "Pilot Enrolment". This was started in June 2005 to test and verify the capabilities of the system. After this stage many issues and requirements were identified and the process of enrolment was stopped. It took two months to the officials for modifying the system to cater identified requirements in the pilot stage. After that, the system was ready for the mass enrolment of the general public or the citizens but the officials started with the enrolment of the employees of government organizations. There were many benefits of doing so because this allowed the officials to further test the working of the whole project and rectify any further complexity. After that interim enrolment of government employees, the mass enrolment phase started. During this phase, certain services were linked to the IDs of individuals such the information for the vehicle and passport renewal of the residents. The project was aimed to get the registration of all of the citizens till the year 2010 which was nearly the time of 3 years. The officials planned to complete all the registration and enrolment for all of the citizens during this time period. Some of the information was gathered directly from various government departments such as the information of births and deaths is directly collected from ministry of health and the information for the employment status is gathered from the ministry of labor. All of the information was then linked to card holders. Then the duties and responsibilities were assigned to various government departments. As the application, issuance and renewal of ID cards is assigned to the ministry of interior.

Figure 4. Card Registration and Issuance Procedure

The whole registration cycle is presented in figure 4, in which the process starts with the verification stage. At the time when information or data about the individual is handed over to the authorities of National ID card then the first stage of the processing starts with the verification of information. During this the system checks the government issued credentials such as visas and passports. Meanwhile, the online verification of presented documents is also done. After that, the enrolment process starts with capturing the photo, getting signature, biometric fingerprint and scanning of documents. Upon the completion of enrolment, then further backend checks are performed and if these checks result positively then the card is issued to the individual.

Problems and Recommendations associated to the Project:

There are many problems in the current system of identity management which caused the delays and inefficiency in the whole process. The first problem is associated to the registration process of the project.

Registration Process:

At the start of the project, it was decided that the project will be continuously reviewed and it is now been observed that the whole enrolment process can be completed in five minutes which currently takes 12-17 minutes. This lengthy process of 17 minutes can be reduced to 5 minutes by re-engineering only the two activities i.e. registration form and biometrics.

The process of filling and submitting the registration form is currently consuming much time and goes through many phases. The process of registration starts with the eight page document. After the reviewing of the whole registration process, this document was eventually reduced to 6-pages and then further it is reduced to 4 pages. The initial form for the registration had many flaws such as:

The registration form was too much lengthy and had repeated information to be filled.

Considerable time was consumed to fill the required information in the application form

Some of information asked by the form was not readily available to the applicant and because of this the person has to re-visit the counter.

Considerable knowledge and expertise was needed to fill the form and most of the applicants were illiterate so they found much difficulty in filling and submitting the registration form

The objectives of the project forced the officials to design such a form in which lot of information was asked from the applicants. The enrolment process was mixed up with the purpose of building the statistical database at the time of filling the form. When so many documents and information was asked by the applicants at the time of registration then the process of registration became so much time taking. The authorities and officials of the project were confused about achieving two objectives at the same time.

Recommendation:

It is recommended that the whole process of implementation must take place in three different stages. At first stage, the enrolment must be initiated with the minimal set of information or data by asking for only the primary identification data at first stage. As Figure 5 shows the primary set of information at this stage which should be asked from the applicants which includes the information about the name, passport and address of the resident.

Figure 5. Primary information gathered at initial stage of enrolment

After successful completion of first stage, the officials must run the stage two and three in parallel. In these stages, the officials must promote the use of the ID cards among the residents to avail the government services such as health, security, licensing, etc. The government must ensure the use of ID cards in all government departments. All of the government departments must update their database to the new IDs of residents.

Currently, the biometric capturing for enrolment process is very lengthy. In this process all of the prints are gathered such as writer’s palm, palm, rolled prints and slaps. It is observed that only the rolled finger prints are used for the purpose of identification where as other prints are stored for criminal purposes for ministry of interior. It is strongly suggested that at the time of enrolment only the flat fingerprints should be captured which will consume less time for completing the enrolment. The other prints should be taken at later stages. By doing this the biometric process will be reduced from 6 minutes to 2 minutes.

Scope of the Project:

At the start of the project, the scope was not much but as time passed, continuous growth was observed in the scope of National ID program which made this project much expensive to manage and took long time to be completed. The program was not completed in the specified time and the officials faced many difficulties. It is true that when the scope of any project is increased then eventually the time of completion and required resources are also increased (WAM, 2012).

It is suggested that the authorities of this project must limit the scope of the project so that it would be easy to implement and manage.

High Level of Security:

It is observed in the system that the officials have emphasized much on the security issues which have turned this into a closed system. Because of this the system has become extremely costly and effort taking for making any minor changes. If at any stage, any change is needed to be performed for this a lot of effort is required. It is suggested that abundance of security should be minimized to make the system manageable.

Conclusion:

The introduction of programs such as National ID Project could be very beneficial for any country in so many ways such homeland security, reduction in crimes, immigration records, identification of residents, effective use of government services and database register of citizens. Meanwhile, these programs should be extensively and effectively planned before the actual initialization. As far as the National ID Project of UAE is concerned, the scope of the project was not well defined and was increased during different stages of its implementation. Because of this it consumed more money and time than planned. The project was ill-planned that is why the project long time to be completed and consumed much resources for its implementation.