processes, and decision-making. The challenge was in all these layers and to link each layer to the other.
What Was the Mandate for SDO and the Tools at Your Disposal to Make Change Happen?
The mandate really was to use technologies to enhance city experiences, to make our people happy—whether they are residents or visitors. It is very easy to state that but difficult to implement because of the layers explained.
The challenge first continued to be the same as it had been during the e-Government time. Each governmental organization was going ahead with its own plans to digitize their systems or enhance their tools or attract experts. We could not just go knocking on their doors. We had to show that we in SDO, we were experts in smart city topics. We also needed to be very humble and down-to-earth to show others that we were there to learn from them and see how we can benefit from their experience to help us in this new government body.
It helped us a lot that Smart Dubai project was very dear to His Highness and the Crown Prince. In any organization, if you want to be a successful leader and have a successful transformation project, you need to have a sponsor. A good sponsor is one of the main driving people of the organization or a city and someone who believes in you, who sees that you are the one who can succeed in that role, and gives you all the power and space to develop and to deliver the desired output.
That is how we got the champions across the government whom we selected. With sponsorship from the rulers, we had each of the leaders of each governmental body sign off that their nominated champion would be the person who could access anything, anytime just to fulfill the Smart Dubai strategy.
What Were the Very First Steps You Took When You Started Leading the SDO?
The first thing was to recruit. I did get an initial team of different consultants who worked with us; they were all outsourced. I needed to recruit a team of nationals, also grow them and have gender balance in the organization.
One of the main early activities was to sign all those agreements with other government entities and champions to make sure that they understood what we do. I was in daily meetings with the decision-makers in all these organizations, sometimes covering three layers of executives to make sure we became very close to them and that they embraced our vision.
I wanted them to talk the same language and to breathe the same air that we did in Smart Dubai. Because later, when we would start to implement the real projects, I wanted everyone to run at the same speed. We were going to have very tight deadlines and I did not want anyone to lag behind due to any miscommunication. That is why I was touring daily from one organization to another.
It was also important to rent us a space for an office that could reflect our identity. A space to show that the smart city is not only technology; it is a new lifestyle, whether in business or in leisure. We needed to embrace that new lifestyle in our office space. A new district was coming out in Dubai, called the Design District. I had suggested to a friend leading its development that the district could be the first green and smart one in Dubai, with sensors and data collection everywhere to see everything happening in the district. SDO became an early mover to this area. Our idea was to be a showcase to anyone visiting our office to help them feel and touch how could technology help us on a daily basis.
We paid a lot of attention to the design of the office itself. We did a huge search among global organizations to see how they had managed to build a successful atmosphere in their organization. At the end of the day, it is not the colorful Google offices but the fabric of the environment and culture inside Google that makes it successful. The culture is within people who will be working in that space as an office, so who can be better than them to design their own offices? Many of our recruits were young and that affected the design of walls, doors, desks, even toilets—everything. We made it 100 percent different from the way offices were designed previously.
What Was the Focus or Core of the Strategy You Had Laid Out and Started Delivering—What Were the Steps for Building Up a Smart City for Happiness?
We designed the strategy for two phases. First was to be three years, from 2015 to 2017, and focused on making sure that all the infrastructure and regulation was going to be up and ready. Second phase then, from 2017 to the end of 2021, was to build on these, to really transform the city, the society, the economy from services, transactions, and data perspective.
In infrastructure, we aimed to create a digital backbone for the city—to have a full stack of new infrastructure designed from blueprint to enable Dubai to grow without any limitations and on open standards so that any kind of new technologies could be plugged into it. We made sure not to be tied to any specific technology or big vendors as such.
We also designed a new business model and a law for government and the private sector to join in public-private partnerships, or PPP. We also had to get in place the previously lacking proper regulation about data: from understanding what we meant by data to classifying data, making sure that data storage and dissemination was to be well documented, and so on. We then had to train government on that new regulation; we even got some degree courses out there. We made some regulations concerning open source, cloud, the internet-of-things.
How Did You Embrace New Things That Must Have Emerged along the Way? Did You Ever Adjust the Strategy?
New things did emerge along the way, such as blockchain and AI, that came from nowhere to the picture. We needed to make sure to plug them with the other stack we were building up. It was easier because we had different teams running different projects, so focus and delivery of overall strategy did not suffer. For example, we had a special team looking at next technologies and scanning the horizon—next to the backbone team, the data team, the strategy team.
Blockchain is a good example of how we adjusted our strategies. We first took it to testing in the Future Accelerator that the Executive Office had set up to embrace new technologies and have Dubai as a hub to implement all these new ideas. We took a small project to see if blockchain could actually help us. The project was about converting all the settlement and reconciliation of the government accounts into the blockchain platform. Citizens pay all public bills to one unified count; the government distributes it in the back end. We got a small start-up from Dubai to help us, and they took a previous forty-five-day process down to a zero-time settlement. A great gain in efficiency.
We took that example and started mapping all the use cases across the government that blockchain could be applicable for, plus we did desktop research and study visits to see how other countries had done it. We mapped some forty use cases and ended up putting a deadline of two years to implement everything in our government with blockchain. Then we found through the implementation that not everything can be applicable for blockchain. So, we changed the direction of our strategy and focused on applicable services only. In this work, we also saw we needed to design procedures, policies, and regulation—for example, for operating a unified blockchain platform for the government.
You see how new directions started from having a team scanning the horizon. They had to suggest a proper strategy, a plan of execution for experimentation. Based on this we could plug it into the existing strategy or road map on a yearly basis.
At the end of every year, we would sit with SDO management team and revisit our strategy to reflect the changing realities. Such reauthorization of strategy was also important because our understanding of what a smart city is would evolve. Every year, we would start to understand more and become more mindful about what can be successful and what cannot be done. This openness and transparency to be able to reshape made the strategy all the more applicable to be implemented—rather than having a very nice, shiny strategic document only.
