Bahrain Adopts ICT Shared Services to Enhance Government Efficiency and Productivity

The Kingdom of Bahrain is a business hub that builds its success on openness and forward thinking. Their challenges are need for standardization of ICT, need to increase efficiency, functionality, productivity, and competitiveness, need for improved technical quality and reliability and need for collaboration capability. They chose Cisco to overcome these challenges. On Cisco IBSG's recommendation, the government decided to move forward with ICT shared services to drive standardization, economies of scale, and quality and $20 million initial investment for unified communications, voice and video conferencing, and other services.. The results were projected unit cost at least 10 percent lower than current cost of comparable ICT services, improved communication within government and reduced downtime, lower security risk.