Page 11 - U4SSC Case study: Circularity to promote local businesses and digitization, June 2020

In this context, the Smart Dubai initiative was born in 2014 from an idea of His Highness Sheikh
Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
The vision of Smart Dubai is to leverage on the city’s inhabitants and make Dubai the happiest city on
earth. In line with its vision, the Smart Dubai initiative has structured its strategic approach to embrace
the latest technology innovation that will make urban experience seamless, safe, personalized and
efficient, and delivering enhanced quality of life to contribute in making Dubai the happiest city on
earth. The Smart Dubai initiative plays a key role in guiding and enabling the city’s ongoing digital
transformation across all sectors.

Challenge and response

Dubai strategically relies on digital transformation and the 4 Industrial Revolution (4IR) leading-edge
th
emerging technologies in achieving its smart city transformation. Such large-scale transformations
require ICT implementations at the city level encompassing public and private sectors and tend to
require substantial expenditure, unless planned and managed carefully. In this context, Smart Dubai
has strategically centralized and shared targeted ICT services and infrastructure provisioning while
decentralising the innovation related to core business aspects.

Smart Dubai Capturing Cross-entity Synergies: Common digital transformation needs in Dubai
public sector entities provided a significant opportunity for achieving operational efficiencies. Ample
cross-entity synergies in data management and IoT, blockchain platforms, AI based systems, digital
identity and payment, various back-office functions compelled Smart Dubai to embark on a broad,
government-wide, and in some cases even city-wide, approach for implementing circular ICT services
and infrastructure. This has avoided the need for various entities to fund and operate their own similar
ICT services and infrastructures separately.

As a result, Smart Dubai has implemented and delivered more than 60 circular (in the shared sense) ICT
services utilized by more than 50 entities in Dubai. This has allowed Smart Dubai to achieve significant
cost savings at the public sector, as well as at city level, due to the efficient use of digital assets.

This smart transformation approach incorporates city digital infrastructure under the city assets and
products and encompasses sharing as the action item as defined within the U4SSC ‘Guidelines on
strategies for circular cities’.

Promoting circularity

Vision and content

The main strategic goals of Smart Dubai circular ICT services and infrastructure are to:

• provide customer-focused agile services by capitalising on ICT-related synergies;

• achieve operational efficiencies and higher returns on ICT investments; and
• significantly reduce the negative environmental impact.

Case study: Circularity to promote local businesses and digitization, June 2020 5