Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 15

I am a curious person by nature, and this characteristic fed my interest in technology as early as my school years. I remember that day when my brother brought an early-generation PC home: I immediately fell in love with the machine. This is a simple example of the accumulating passion to technology discovery that I had and still have. I did not like technology for itself but what technology can do, and the solutions built with it and around it. I believe this was the flame igniting where I have reached today.

My major at university was business information technology: how we can apply ICT to help businesses to fulfill their targets and objectives. I was attracted to how we can utilize such innovative ideas and tools for advancing government and its services.

This was the concrete area for my PhD, after which I was appointed to work with the Executive Office under His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and the Ruler of Dubai. The office is a think tank with responsibility to bring ideas to implement in Dubai to take the emirate ten years ahead. Many bold ideas, such as the Internet City or the Dubai International Financial Center, came out of that office before.¹ I worked in different projects, none of which was an ICT project per se.

About 2014 or so smart city ideas became trendy across global conferences. It was attractive to us in Dubai, and we started looking at how a smart government or a smart city would be different from having an e-Government. Because I had the background, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum appointed me to lead the Smart Dubai project, which was called initially Smart Dubai Office. I was the first woman globally to be commissioned with such a mandate.

To be honest, I thought I would lead it only in the first initial stage and put the high-level strategy together, then hand it over to one of the other bodies in the government. The usual role of the Executive Office was to design a strategy or design a direction and a high-level road map, after which the implementation was done by someone else.

I was thrilled that His Highness chose me to run the smart city strategy we had designed with my team. Part of that strategy is to build an office with responsibility to orchestrate all the activities happening in the city, whether it be from public and private sector—in order to convert Dubai into a smart city. From there my story really started.