Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 17

There was some initial work done before I got a call to join the team. Some team members had put together three to four pages of very high-level ideas on how to be the smartest city: provide free Wi-Fi for everyone, have an online trading platform or online system for logistics, and other such things. I was called by the chairman of the Executive Office that His Highness wanted to start a smart city project, and to come in the next day to take it over and lead to a proper plan.

His Highness had the vision to make Dubai the number one smart city globally. But there was no unified definition in the world for 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.