Page 13 - U4SSC Case study: Circularity to promote local businesses and digitization, June 2020

• High levels of service delivery: Smart Dubai constantly enhances its circular ICT services and
infrastructure with new features to meet public sector entities’ needs and expectations. Smart
Dubai provides its circular ICT services through strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to public
sector entities. An availability of 99.95 per cent was achieved for its circular ICT services in 2017
and support calls were closed within SLA compliance target times, resulting in more than 80 per
cent customer happiness scores.
• Enhanced Decision Support & 4IR Capabilities: Government-wide data stored in centralized
systems and repositories has enabled advanced analytics and business intelligence for various
central government entities responsible for government-level policy making and decision support.
It also allowed the utilisation of advanced 4IR capabilities such as data science, AI and blockchain,
due to their flexible design.

• Public Sector Policies Implementation: Circular ICT services also enabled the easier implementation
of widely applicable public sector policies over the years. In the absence of these services, each
entity would have to expend significant efforts and resources to their individual systems for policies
compliance, resulting in a significant replication of efforts.

• Knowledge sharing as a circular activity across the public sector: Smart Dubai circular ICT services
provided a concrete platform for sharing and exchanging ideas across the public sector. Entities
shared their business requirements and needs among each other openly. An innovation idea
belonging to one entity when implemented became available to all the other entities. Collective
knowledge capital was enriched at the public sector level.
• Scalable and flexible expansion: Smart Dubai circular ICT services are unified and centralized
solutions used by several government entities by their very nature. They are designed to
accommodate future expansion in terms of economies of scale (adding new entities) and also in
terms of economies of scope (implementing additional new services).
• Enhanced Resilience: The centralized nature of public sector circular ICT services and infrastructure
enabled disaster-recovery and resilience aspects to be implemented in a carefully planned manner.
Smart Dubai circular ICT services and infrastructure are resilient by design, incorporating features
like redundancies and automatic fail-over mechanisms.
• Reduced environmental impact due to consolidation: The circular approach undertaken by Smart
Dubai has circumvented the need for public sector entities to replicate ICT infrastructures in their
own premises. Consequently, ICT services and infrastructure have been consolidated significantly
due to economies of scale and also scope. Furthermore, the total amount of ICT equipment (IT
assets such as network equipment, server equipment) has decreased considerably (resulting in cost
savings). The impact has also been in CO reductions due to considerably reduced and consolidated
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ICT equipment. Hence, these services have achieved positive environmental impacts and significant
benefits in green computing.

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