Page 14 - Enhancing innovation and participation in smart sustainable cities

United for Smart Sustainable Cities
Enhancing Innovation and Participation

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Dubai is one of the seven emirates in the federation of the United Arab Emirates. The emirate has enjoyed a strong
economic growth trajectory, and has managed to establish itself as one of the leading emerging economies with
a sustained record of real GDP growth rate. Dubai’s Government as a whole is composed of several specialized
entities (departments, authorities, committees, councils, etc.), which were independently established through
legal mandates. Hence, these entities operated autonomously in fulfilling their missions over the years. A holistic
government approach did not exist in terms of concrete cross-entity electronic shared services (ESS). More
specifically, there was no institution established (mandated) or appointed to carry out ESS activities on a large
scale and extent at the government level. There were examples of a few ad-hoc projects that were initiated in the
past among a small number of government entities, resulting in limited cooperation and collaboration; however,
there was no government-level strategy that formalized a “whole-of-government” approach prior to the ESS
initiative.

1.2 Challenge and response
A lack of government-wide electronic shared services has compelled government entities to individually invest in
various information and communication technology (ICT) solutions and electronic services capabilities, resulting
in the replication of efforts and resources. Furthermore, there were no incentives to share knowledge and
practices across the government entities despite potential synergies.

Despite the fact that common administrative back-office (support) activities existed among government entities,
they were implemented individually within the confines of each respective government entity from a policy,
people, process and technology perspective. As such, synergies were abundant in human resources management,
financial management, supply-chain management, etc. All these commonalities pointed to a huge potential for
horizontal cross-entity synergies. Concomitantly, advances in ICT were enabling automation as well as the
centralized provisioning of such cross-entity synergies in a successful manner. Dubai Government faced the
challenge of incurring significantly higher financial, human and technology resources needs, which in turn
amplified expenditure at the government level due to a lack of horizontal collaboration and coordination in the
early 2000s.

In view of the above, the Dubai Government launched a comprehensive electronic shared services (ESS) initiative
as part of its citywide digital transformation. An extensive centralized “whole-of-government” approach was
adopted for the common (synergistic) aspects of core and administrative (support) services for electronic
enablement, referred to as ESS. This centralized whole-of-government approach played a critical role in facilitating
and incentivizing Dubai Government entities (DGEs) to collaborate and to cooperate.
This case study pertains to the domain of smart governance within the U4SSC. More specifically, it is a case study
illustrating a strong case for creating efficiencies in a city through shared services.

12 U4SSC series