Page 217 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

Consensus by partners on business case and business model (cost benefit analysis, etc.), risk
allocation, transparency on fiscal issues, and ensuring alignment on public sector partner’s delivery
of its mission are essential for sustainable success. Technology and customer (demand) uncertainty
are inherent in sophisticated city-wide technology projects such as Smart Dubai Platform and need
to be flexibly incorporated and addressed as part of the PPP agreement.
On the other hand, PPPs provide significant advantages by bringing together the best of two worlds
(Public and Private sector) with each contributing significantly to the partnership. Different
perspectives between public and private sector partners can be reconciled, leveraged, and further
capitalized as an advantage by a successful partnership. Innovative ideas can be jointly developed
by partners to enhance the value for the ultimate customers by splitting the investments, revenues,
and risks.

Technology and demand uncertainty pose great opportunities as well as challenges for the future.
In the case of SDP, there is ample opportunity for incorporating new services and functionality in
the platform through innovation; albeit with certain risks. Hence, it will be quite important to
balance rewards and risks in the future while innovating new services and functionality. Additionally,
establishing and adopting an appropriate governance model will be quite key for sustaining the
success of SDP.
 Focus on knowledge and skills building:
Ongoing training, workshops and awareness events are held to enhance platform services and data
related skills of government employees. Additional city wide awareness sessions, educational
programs and hackathons drive data usage and enhance the insights unlocked from data.
 Recognize and award success:
Awarding success and recognizing efforts are important for ensuring participants’ continuous
contribution and active involvement in these transformative initiatives. Data providers that
contribute to the Dubai Data use cases, for example, are recognized and their efforts are highlighted
at the highest levels of leadership in Dubai Government. Compliance is driven by awarding the
entities that engage with these initiatives and reporting high achievers to top leadership in the
Emirate. Additionally, key performance indicators were infused in Dubai Government level
programs and awards, to drive up participation of local government data providers in the initiative
and to utilize city-wide platform services.
 Active communication, engagement and inclusiveness:
Smart Dubai promotes extensive participation in both initiatives and the usage of Dubai Data by
focusing on real use cases and policy problems in the city and demonstrating visual analytical
findings to government entities. By showcasing how the platform and data publication and exchange
can help solve real life challenges that city planners face, city entities are more eager than ever to
take part in these initiatives. Furthermore, there is ongoing communication about the progress of
these initiatives and the activities conducted through direct and indirect channels.
 Facilitating demand and supply:
The value of the platform and the data in Dubai will be realized based on: the quality of the supply
of platform services and the open and shared data on it; and the demand from users. Without use
and reuse of data, the value derived from opening and sharing data will be minimum. Smart Dubai
and Dubai Data Establishment play a facilitation role in determining the priority list of platform
services and datasets to be opened and shared with data providers. Needless investment in
generating, opening and sharing data that are not conductive to value creation is avoided through
a robust, collaborative, needs-based prioritization approach. Furthermore, efforts are taken to
enhance the quality of platform services and the data supply making it reliable, discoverable and
interoperable.

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