Page 18 - Enhancing innovation and participation in smart sustainable cities

United for Smart Sustainable Cities
Enhancing Innovation and Participation

Similarly, SMS mobile messaging is implemented as a shared service and more than 285 million SMS messages
were sent by government entities, schools and some private entities in 2016.
Key enablers of ESS in Dubai

Leadership support: Commitment at the highest levels in the government has been crucial to ensure ESS success.
The ESS initiative was linked to the overall vision of digital transformation of the Dubai Government, and recently
of the city itself. Due to the continued political support at the highest levels, ESS have been rigorously tracked and
championed by different government entities in Dubai.

Customer engagement and participation: ESS aim to solely serve the customer. They are utilized by customers to
meet their business needs. Hence, understanding, identifying and incorporating the customer needs in ESS
implementations are absolutely crucial. In order to achieve this, proactive customer engagement, facilitation and
participation have been essential. Customer engagement and participation has increased the buy-in and the
ownership of ESS considerably.

For example, GRP ESS implementation entailed intensive engagement and facilitation of government entities’ staff
and required more than 100 government-level innovation workshops, which were attended by more than 300
representatives from different government entities referred to as ‘business owners’. These “business owners”
have streamlined, standardized and automated more than 200 back-office support and administrative processes.
A majority of the innovations in ESS came directly from the users and planners of ESS.
Customer satisfaction and management: It is of the utmost importance to achieve customer satisfaction in ESS
delivery. Operational efficiencies (intended cost savings) are one vital side of the coin but the other side is
customer satisfaction. High customer satisfaction has enabled high adoption of ESS, which in turn, has enabled
achievement of the intended operational efficiencies.

Over the years as the number of ESS rollouts and the number of customers increased, the need for formal
customer management has risen almost naturally. Handling customer needs and expectations and resolving
various ESS incidents related to customers were critical for the success of the initiative. In 2015 alone, there were
more than 41 000 customer inquiries which needed to be resolved.

Continuous improvement through enhancements: ESS implementation is not a one-time activity but rather a
continuous journey for adapting to the changing needs of customers and the environment in general through
enhancements. These enhancements may take the form of new ESS features, business requirements, etc. or they
may cause issues related to ESS core processes. ESS enhancements include upgrades, new releases, integrations
with core systems (legacy systems), government policy changes, implementation of new government laws and
amendments. Over time ESS core processes were always revised and streamlined. Some examples of this include:
ƒ introducing formal customer management;
ƒ streamlining service monitoring and delivery processes to achieve high availability rates;
ƒ streamlining customer support and incident management processes;
ƒ promoting the delivery of services through service level agreements (SLAs);
ƒ conducting customer surveys;
ƒ integrating customer survey results with customer management processes.
In view of these examples, it is necessary to achieve some flexibility and agility in ESS implementations and core
processes to incorporate changing needs and requirements.
Boosting the skills of staff: ESS are ICT-based services in nature. Even though technology has been a very strong
enabler, it also poses challenges from a management perspective. Technology tends to change frequently, and
technology-related processes also need to be revised and re-implemented to manage changing customer needs
and innovations.
Technology product timelines are fairly short (becoming even shorter over time) and new versions of products are
released very frequently. Similarly, new technology and service management processes are formulated quite
regularly. Keeping up with these changes is definitely challenging. These are very rapid cycles requiring agility and
flexibility in terms of implementation and requisite skills.
This necessitates quick learning and adaptation to these changes. Hence, it is important to invest in people skills
and to keep their knowledge up-to-date. Technology management and ESS operational processes are critical.
Investing in training and staff development to handle these rapid changes is essential.

16 U4SSC series