Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 26

At the beginning, when I was doing those tours across the government, we spoke to the CEOs plus the CIOs. I wanted to make sure the CEO himself believes in our mission, so that his CIO who already believed in us could support us. That opened a new door for me personally to be able to be very close with those CEOs.

Whenever we later wanted anything to be implemented in our city, it often took just a phone call with the CEOs to get to implement a thing. We did not need any of those protocols or procedures to convince anyone or send letters.

By the way, this helped us a lot once when the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country in 2020. We had three days to test all the systems and make sure that during the weekend everything was ready to convert the government from physical to online work. This was possible only with the support of all the CEOs.

We did not work with the CEOs as a group too officially, more from a casual perspective. This was on purpose, as I wanted to show that when we would implement smart systems, our lives become easier and our communication should be much easier. If we wanted changes in our communities and environment, we also had to change how we related and worked as CEOs.

Every year, we did an international visit together with government entity CIOs. It was like a retreat, but for learning. Every year we chose a different topic and a different destination—depending on the topics we had at hand in our journey. Or we went to an event like the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, where we could sit down with all the cities attending the summit. These trips were a way to bring CIOs onboard, uplift them from a knowledge perspective to see the new technologies the way we saw it, and also enable them to share their knowledge from their sector—be it health or mobility.