Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 23

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.