You will find a short epilogue in way of a summary, where I have tried to distill a few of the biggest common learnings and takeaways from the twenty stories. This epilogue aims to provide the shorthand playbook on key themes of how to be or become an effective leader to drive a government (or any organization) to digital excellence.
CHAPTER 1 Aisha Bin Bishr: Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Bint Buti Bin Bishr has been the vice chairman of Emaar Development Board since December 2020. She was the founding Director General of the Smart Dubai Department, UAE between 2015 and 2020, the government entity entrusted with Dubai's citywide smart digital transformation.
During that time, Aisha was a member of various boards, including the Dubai Future Council for Blockchain as its chairperson, World Happiness Council, World Economic Forum's Global Future Council, and many more.
Prior to her Smart Dubai role, Aisha served as the Assistant Director General of Dubai Executive Office and Assistant Undersecretary of the UAE Ministry of Labour. Throughout her twenty-seven-year experience in ICT development, Aisha committed herself to humanizing digital transformation, from developing technologies to transforming human experiences.
She is considered among the world's most acclaimed digital transformation and smart cities thought leaders. Forbes Middle East ranked her among the Middle East's top ten most powerful businesswomen in 2020. She has received numerous accolades and awards, especially for her leadership as the first woman to lead the transformation of a smart city globally.
Aisha stands out in this book, because she is the only one among the twenty people featured here who was a digital government leader on a city level. There are also many other great city digital leaders, of course, but Aisha has been the most exceptional of those I have encountered.
One reason is to simply take a look at what Dubai has achieved on the smart city front during her time. These have not just been flashy showcase works, but systemic change and at breakneck speed.
Aisha really has been at the helm there, (re)defining in the process globally what a smart city is and should be about—the widespread application of digital tools in government for real advancement of peoples' lives in a city. She managed all this with zero initial budget, the context of top-down governance, and as a strong woman in a classically very male environment.
In addition to all that leadership courage and acumen, she is also the most caring leader you can imagine. It manifests even in the slightest of encounters with her, including in this chapter.
—SIIM
How Did You Rise to the Digital Government Leadership Role in Dubai?
I am a curious person by nature, and this characteristic fed my interest in technology as early as my school years. I remember that day when my brother brought an early-generation PC home: I immediately fell in love with the machine. This is a simple example of the accumulating passion to technology discovery that I had and still have. I did not like technology for itself but what technology can do, and the solutions built with it and around it. I believe this was the flame igniting where I have reached today.
My major at university was business information technology: how we can apply ICT to help businesses to fulfill their targets and objectives. I was attracted to how we can utilize such innovative ideas and tools for advancing government and its services.
This was the concrete area for my PhD, after which I was appointed to work with the Executive Office under His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and the Ruler of Dubai. The office is a think tank with responsibility to bring ideas to implement in Dubai to take the emirate ten years ahead. Many bold ideas, such as the Internet City or the Dubai International Financial Center, came out of that office before.1 I worked in different projects, none of which was an ICT project per se.
About 2014 or so smart city ideas became trendy across global conferences. It was attractive to us in Dubai, and we started looking at how a smart government or a smart city would be different from having an e-Government. Because I had the background, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum appointed me to lead the Smart Dubai project, which was called initially Smart Dubai Office. I was the first woman globally to be commissioned with such a mandate.
To be honest, I thought I would lead it only in the first initial stage and put the high-level strategy together, then hand it over to one of the other bodies in the government. The usual role of the Executive Office was to design a strategy or design a direction and a high-level road map, after which the implementation was done by someone else.
I was thrilled that His Highness chose me to run the smart city strategy we had designed with my team. Part of that strategy is to build an office with responsibility to orchestrate all the activities happening in the city, whether it be from public and private sector—in order to convert Dubai into a smart city. From there my story really started.
What Was the Concrete Expectation Laid Out for You?
It was exactly to execute the strategy of converting Dubai to a smart city. Connecting all those dots that were already happening in this direction to make sure that we had a unified fabric across all the sectors in Dubai. For example, we focused on the high-achieving sectors in Dubai because the city is a known tourist hub, and also a trade and a logistics hub. We looked for smart opportunities in these areas. But we also looked a lot from the perspective of infrastructure for the whole city—from Wi-Fi everywhere up to a common decision-making platform. This was the direction given by His Highness.
The main challenge His Highness commissioned me to resolve was to allow His Highness to know that everyone in our city is happy and satisfied with whatever service has been provided. Not only from government, but from the whole city in a holistic approach. Our main mission and key performance indicator (KPI) were to make sure that our people are happy, as part of the overall Happiness Agenda that His Highness had started.
Yet, no one was measuring happiness well at the time. To measure happiness, you need to measure everything in the city. I was puzzled about it at the beginning, because happiness is far-far away from my major in IT. How can I map such an objective to make sure that we have a proper setup to measure such kind of goals?
How Did You Go about Devising the Strategy and the Metrics Then?
There was some initial work done before I got a call to join the team. Some team members had put together three to four pages of very high-level ideas on how to be the smartest city: provide free Wi-Fi for everyone, have an online trading platform or online system for logistics, and other such things. I was called by the chairman of the Executive Office that His Highness wanted to start a smart city project, and to come in the next day to take it over and lead to a proper plan.
His Highness had the vision to make Dubai the number one smart city globally. But there was no unified definition in the world for what a smart city was. I started with some desktop research first: I looked into different frameworks of smart cities. All of them were very rigid as a set of KPIs for certain cities. For Dubai, we needed to revisit the KPIs that were often used and come up with a blend of our own.
Then I sat back and looked—do we have these things here at all that we might measure? How can we make sure these different metrics and sectors are visible to everyone, connected with each other? We needed to run the city and make decisions about the city as a whole. So far, every manager and