“ First was to drive engagement and value across our programmes and departments , second to improve the strength of our cybersecurity , third to drive process efficiency , fourth to boost cost-effectiveness , fifth to build staff capacity , and sixth to align technology and innovation ” — Kaan Cetinturk , CIO and Director of Information Management and Technology , UNRWA
“ First was to drive engagement and value across our programmes and departments , second to improve the strength of our cybersecurity , third to drive process efficiency , fourth to boost cost-effectiveness , fifth to build staff capacity , and sixth to align technology and innovation ” — Kaan Cetinturk , CIO and Director of Information Management and Technology , UNRWA
have the luxury of sequential strategies with the aim of serving each goal in time . Instead , programmes are strategically aligned across all six objectives to serve them each in parallel . “ These programmes include many cybersecurity initiatives , implementation of an agency-wide service management platform , a document management system for digitalisation of our paper records , adoption of business intelligence technologies for transparency and better decision-making , and modernisation of our infrastructure ,” he says . “ Along with this , we have finalised the agency cloud strategy .”
UNRWA ’ s operations and services have all benefited exponentially from these comprehensive strategies , and this is perhaps best demonstrated by its healthcare and education platforms and the ways they have both aided millions of refugees . E-health , its proprietary healthcare management system , is connected to the organisation ’ s ERP platform and is thereby augmented with the medical data of all registered refugees . “ Before the implementation of e-health , UNRWA ’ s health centres were very crowded with patients who had to wait a long time to receive the services they need ,” recalls Cetinturk . “ Contact time with doctors was also relatively short because of the crowdedness .”
A major factor causing these bottlenecks was the lack of digital infrastructure , leaving healthcare providers to use paper-based records whose receipt was delayed by the inherent slowness of inter-office transfers . “ It was also very tedious to extract reports about any of the functions in the health centres , including statistics about services delivered and the consumption of medicines , medical
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