Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 18

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.