what a smart city was. I started with some desktop research first: I looked into different frameworks of smart cities. All of them were very rigid as a set of KPIs for certain cities. For Dubai, we needed to revisit the KPIs that were often used and come up with a blend of our own.
Then I sat back and looked—do we have these things here at all that we might measure? How can we make sure these different metrics and sectors are visible to everyone, connected with each other? We needed to run the city and make decisions about the city as a whole. So far, every manager and agency looked at their own perspective only. Transport would just look at the transport perspective, municipality would look at theirs. We did not see the same image of our city.
It meant that we needed to build a digital urban planning platform for all of us. This was different from the KPIs that all the existing frameworks talked about. So, we moved from a set of KPIs into knowing that we wanted to redesign the city experiences and to give everyone managing the city a tool that would allow them to talk to each other and revisit the full city experience to enhance it. Instead of KPIs, we started to rethink the city from design thinking perspective to make sure the experiences would be happy ones.
Later, I pushed a lot to share our thinking and learnings and data widely, too. The data we came up with can be a tool for city managers from around the world to better understand how to uplift their cities to the desired level.
You Already Hinted a Bit about It, but Did You Hesitate at All When Taking the Job of Leading the SDO?
There were some challenges; sure.
It is not easy when you work with an existing infrastructure. In Dubai and in UAE, we have a young infrastructure and do not really have legacies. But it is still not a greenfield context. There was and is a brownfield context also with existing executives and leaders who were leading their sectors, such as mobility or transportation, business or health or education.
It is not an easy job for a woman like me to go knocking on the door of each organization responsible for their sector, telling them to open their infrastructure, to plug their infrastructure in with our infrastructure. Each one of them has their own CEO, and they think they have a solution. Yes, it may be the best solution for their own sector, but not necessarily the best solution for the whole city. This was one of the challenges.
The other was how to put up a budget for such a project. His Highness the Ruler said that Dubai had invested so much in our infrastructure, and he was sure that we had enough. He was sure about what was already there in our city, and he was right. The additional funds came later when we started the uptake of the next, fourth industrial revolution technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain. At the beginning, we had to instead connect the existing systems in our city and that did not need that much of a budget. His Highness also said that we first needed to make sure we understood what we requested. That is why we spent the first months on a real exploration finding out what we had here in our city and what the next steps could be.
Maybe it is part of my character to love challenges, so I did not hesitate much after all. This also part of what we have learned from our leadership here in Dubai: any day that does not have a challenge, we do not count it as a day.
Given These Challenges, Did You Have Any Requests Going In?
It was not a condition per se, but part of what I presented to His Highness the Ruler and to the Executive Committee was that we needed to have champions in all the government, semi-government, and private sector entities to work directly with us and have dual reporting lines. If we wanted to reach our goals, we needed to run in a very high-speed mode, different from the existing government mode.
Although Dubai has been known as the Dubai Inc. government for the way we operate as almost like a private sector, what we needed for smart city building was a very fast decision-making process and a very fast access to the infrastructure in different government organizations. We needed all the CEOs of the government and city on the same page, in one platform and organization.
The idea behind this request was also to integrate efforts and to make the agendas clear in front of each other. The benefit of one organization would mean the benefits for everyone. We needed to become close to them to be able to deliver at speed, and that is what we achieved later thanks to everyone's cooperation.
What Was Your Own Motivation in Taking Up the Call by His Highness?
First of all, if His Highness asks you to join his team, you do not hesitate for a moment, because it is His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and the Ruler of Dubai's team. The leader who has disrupted how governments work and plan forever.
But it also was a dream come true for me to be part of the decision-making process in the government. What would be a better role than running the digital backbone and platform for the whole city? Knowing that the digitization had become a very necessary tool for any organization, whether it be in private or public sector.
My motivation also was that I would be the first woman there. This way, I would support my other female colleagues in the government to also grow and their career to advance.
To be honest, I also like to be challenged! I had just submitted the final draft of the strategy to His Highness and took a few days of break. My plan was to leave government to look after my mother and my daughter, as I had been away for a long time. I had even written my resignation letter already.
Then I received the call on my trip that His Highness had signed the strategy into effect and even signed the decree I had written to establish the Smart Dubai Office (SDO). I said it was great news and asked whom had he chosen to be the director general. I had suggested some names, but not my own.
That is when I heard that His Highness had said I should be the best person to lead it because I had led the strategy from the beginning. He saw how I was eager to bring the best of global knowledge to the table. I was blessed that His Highness had faith in me.
What Was the State of Digital Development in Dubai at the Time, and What Led You to Suggest Creating the SDO?
In 2003, the Dubai government issued a decree that we were to have a unified enterprise resource planning solution for the government to manage human resources and so on. No government entity could go and invest in its own separate solution. Similarly, in the same period, the e-Government Office was launched on the idea to unify all of government services. It ended up having only a unified website after the first eighteen months. It took them almost thirteen years to try and push organizations to move from offline to online and from informative services to transactional services, but not fully online.
Why did it take thirteen years? Because here in Dubai, we have both a centralized and decentralized government at once. We have centralized budget funds, but decentralized execution in different bodies with their own directions and strategies. They come and meet at the center only for funds. It had been difficult to maneuver and bring everyone on the same page.
This had been the main point of my PhD thesis—such kinds of change in any organization should be top-down with strong leadership that supports the change across the organization. This huge change will change the lifestyle of an organization, a city, or a government or a country. You cannot expect that to happen by agencies themselves. Transformation had not been given such a momentum in Dubai before; that is why SDO was necessary.
I knew that SDO and we needed to work in several layers and not only in technology. The technology part is the easiest part: you can bring in any vendor and they will build it for you. The
