Page 15 - Case study: Smart Dubai Happiness Meter in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

real-time instantaneous results, and also perform analyses such as reporting results by entity,
channel, customer touch point, location, etc.

Happiness Meter Impacts and Benefits: Despite its simplicity, Happiness Meter has been a very
useful policy tool for collecting happiness data in a timely, and extensive manner with a wide
coverage of touch points at the city level.

Social Impact:

• Direct linkage to Smart Dubai vision: Happiness Meter has played an instrumental role in
gauging happiness of city experiences linking directly to Smart Dubai’s vision of becoming the
happiest city on earth. Smart Dubai uses other complementary measurement tools to assess
happiness (e.g. surveys, social media sentiment analyses, etc.), however Happiness Meter has
provided instant feedback as opposed to delayed mechanisms that measure happiness with a
certain time lag.

• Engaging Public: Happiness Meter has been a simple tool to engage people to gauge their city
experiences satisfaction across several touchpoints. It plays the role of a simple participation tool
for people and allows them to provide instant feedback and if they want they can also provide
detailed feedback for the reasons of their selections.

• Improvement in Social Services: Happiness Meter has been incorporated in several social
services (in addition to others in the city) and allows direct feedback on them, which in turn
enables targeted enhancements and improvements in social services delivery.

Economic Impact:

• Focus on core business: Since Smart Dubai has taken the responsibility of designing,
implementing and operating Happiness Meter, Dubai government entities were relieved to
implement the same on their own and focus on their core businesses and enhance customer
experiences during their services delivery. Happiness Meter also enabled a uniform way of
measuring city experiences’ happiness (as opposed to each and every entity formulating its own
approach which would complicate aggregation of results).

• Cost savings through operational efficiencies: Happiness Meter has been implemented as a
circular (shared) service capitalizing on the synergies that exist among the city entities that utilize
it. This has allowed significant cost savings; since in the absence of such a shared solution, each
and every entity would invest on its own to implement it. It would also pose challenges in terms
of collecting and aggregating data from several entities. Smart Dubai designed Happiness Meter
flexible and scalable enough to accommodate future expansion in terms of economies of scale
(adding new entities) and also in terms of economies of scope (implementing enhancements).

• Improvement in Economic Services: Happiness Meter has been incorporated in several
economic services (in addition to others in the city) and allows direct feedback on them, which
in turn enables targeted enhancements and improvements in economic services delivery.
Several public sector entities providing economy related services such as business licensing,

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