Page 40 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

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 Government as a whole is composed of
several specialised 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 ESS initiative.

1.2 Challenge and response
Lack of government-wide electronic shared services compelled government entities to individually invest in
various information and communication technology (ICT) solutions and electronic services capabilities
resulting in 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 centralised 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 expenditures at the government level due to lack of horizontal
collaboration and coordination in early 2000s.

In view of the above, the Dubai Government launched a comprehensive electronic shared services (ESS)
initiative as part of its city-wide 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.

36 U4SSC series