Digital Strategy for a Successful Smart

City Initiative
By: Dr. Saeed Al Dhaheri
ICT Expert
@DDSaeed
productive
Cooperative
Efficient

Social
Sustainable Competitive

Prosperous
Wired

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Agenda: A digital Strategy for a
Successful Smart City Initiative
 What Drives Smart Cities?
 What is a Smart City?
 Smart City Planning Principles
 Smart City Topology
 What is a Digital Strategy
 Areas of Focus for a Smart City Digital Strategy
 Other Considerations
 Dubai Smart City Initiative
 Conclusions

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

What Drives Smart Cities

 To overcome challenges associated with urbanization

“managing urban areas has become one of the most important Pollution
development challenges of the 21st century.” – John Wilmoth
Water Energy
 A need for Sustainability City
Transportation challenges Governance
 Other Drivers:
 Boosting image, Enhancing safety, Hosting global events Housing Waste
Health
 New technologies bring promising solutions
 resources optimization and better management
of infrastructure
 Achieve infrastructure efficiency

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

What is a smart city?

 No one definition for smart city –> depends

 “smartness” comes from information management
and aggregation
 Smart cities are based on the principle of information
and data exchange between different sectors of a city
 “A smart city is a developing organism that takes
advantage of the best contemporary technology
available.”

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

 Smart City Definitions
•“A city well performing in a forward-looking way in economy, people, governance, mobility,
environment & living, built on the smart combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive
independent and aware citizens” (Giffinger & Gudrum, 2010)
Scholar’s view
•“A city to be smart when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and
modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life,
with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance” (Caragliu, 2009)

•“Smart City as a high-tech intensive and advanced city that connects people, information and city
elements using new technologies in order to create sustainable greener city, competitive and innovative
commerce and an increase life quality with a straightforward administration and maintenance system of
city” (Barcelona City Hall, 2011)
City’s View
•“Amsterdam Smart City uses innovative technology and the willingness to change behavior related to
energy consumption in order to tackle climate goals. Amsterdam Smart City is an universal approach for
design and development of a sustainable, economically viable program that will reduce the city’s
carbon footprint” (Amsterdam Smart City, 2009)
•“The use of Smart Computing technologies to make the critical infrastructure components and services
of a city —which include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate,
transportation, and utilities — more intelligent, interconnected, and efficient.” (Forrester, 2011)
Practitioner’s
•“A smart city is based on intelligent exchanges of information that flow between its many different
view subsystems. This flow of information is analyzed and translated into citizen and commercial services. The
city will act on this information flow to make its wider ecosystem more resource-efficient and sustainable.
The information exchange is based on a smart governance operating framework designed for cities
sustainable.” (Gartner, 2011)
By 2016, over 80% of smart city projects will not qualify as smart city projects because
they will address only one city domain - Gartner

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Smart City Parameters
Smart Energy
 Smart meters
 Smart Grids
 Intelligent energy storage
Smart health care
 ehealth and mhealth
 Intelligent medical devices
 Personalized healthcare
Smart Governance
 e-gov/m-gov
 Smart services
Smart Education
 eLearning
 Personalized learning
 Virtual classroom
Smart mobility
 Smart parking
 Advanced Traffic
management
 Intelligent boards
Smart citizens
 Smart life style choices
 Use of green mobility
options
Smart Infrastructure
 Sensor networks
 Digital management of
water and waste
management
 Resource awareness
Technology
 4G connectivity
 IoT
 Free Wi-Fi
 Fiber-to-the-home
 Big Data analytics
Smart Buildings
 Green Buildings
 Renewable energy
integration
 Intelligent building
management
Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014
Smart city planning principles

 start with an urban plan that clearly states the key objectives
 Cities priorities are different
 Approach? Greenfield vs. Brownfield
 Greenfield: broader plan (holistic approach)
 Brownfield: tactical view and gradual with small executable projects
 Urban planners + CDO + CIO’s work together to:
 Define stakeholders and requirements
 Priorities, constraints, challenges
 Define the smart city initiative as a holistic formula of technology
and citizen services
 Develop a smart city framework
 Develop measurements of business and citizens impact

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Smart City Topology

Gartner Smart City topology

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

What is a Digital Strategy?

 Maximizing digital opportunities for a smart city initiative

 Is a business answer to a digital question
 How should the city evolve to survive and thrive in an increasingly digital
world
 A lens on business strategy
 Each city sets its own unique priorities
 A digital Strategy depends on a smart city framework adopted
 A pragmatic approach to a digital strategy must be considered

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Areas of Focus of a Smart City
Digital Strategy
Public-
Private
Partnerships Added
Value

Citizen-
centricity

Smart city
Open
digital Innovation
strategy

Technology

Inter-
operability
Digital
security

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Added Value

 Value for all constituents: Citizens, government, businesses

 Citizens:
 Focus on diversity of citizen needs
 Differentiated services convenience according to user profile, preference,
usage,,,etc
 Government:
 Operational efficiency,
 Cost efficiency
 More sustainable infrastructure and services
 Business:
 Digital services to generate revenue shared with government

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

citizen services

 Provider: government departments, service providers, public-private

partnership
 Citizen-centric services
 Focus on citizen experience
 Personalized experience
 Multi-channel delivery of services with focus on mobile
 Co-creation of community services
 Monitoring users behavior and service consumption
 Social networking

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Open Innovation

 Effective use of city open data to produce new apps

and services
 Service innovation based on citizen engagement
through multiple channels including social media
 Effective crowdsourcing strategies
 Leverge data from IoT and M2M for digital business

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Public-Private Partnerships

 Public-Private partnerships
 Engage in public-private partnerships to develop business services that
citizens can use
 Forging mutual benefits partnerships
 Explore alternative sourcing models to partner with relevant industries
and technology providers in smart city ecosystem

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Interoperability & Integration

 Interoperability between the different OT of the various sector

domains.
 An Interoperable physical and logical understanding of
process flows of data from different systems must be ensured
 Standards for data sharing and exchange must be defined
 Explore Open-source and open industry standards
 Challenge: Integration between OP network and
communication network is critical and often complex
 The concept of data sharing platform

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Technology

Hype cycle for smart city technologies and solution 2014 - Gartner
Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014
Technology

Benefits and adoption of smart city technologies and solutions

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014
Digital Security

 To mitigate digital risk

 Need to protect digital assets of all forms in digital business
and ensure that relationships among those assets can be
trusted
 Digital security is a convergence of Info. Sec, IT security, OT
security, and IoT Security
 Ensure Privacy issues
Other Considerations for The Digital
Strategy
 Information management strategy
 People strategy
 Data gathering, analytical, decision making and pattern recognition
 Collaboration and working in virtual teams
 Challenges include search for talents
 New roles, e.g. chief digital officer
 Capacity building, Preparing digital citizens and digital workforce
 Governance
 Clear measurements to assess impact on citizens and businesses

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Dubai Smart City initiative

 Dubai, the first Arab smart city

 Push by the visionary leadership of HH Sheikh Mohammed
“We strive to catalyze innovation and push the limits of using technology to benefit
people,,, Our goal is to improve the quality of life as we aim to harness technology for
the establishment of a new reality in the city of Dubai, a different life, and a different
development model. Our ambition is that this project touches the life of everyone in our
country, or every mother in her house, or every employee in his work, or every investor in
his project, or every child in his school, and doctor in his clinic. Our goal is to bring about
happiness to all. May Allah help us in achieving this end,” Sheikh Mohammed said.

 Dubai smart city’s main aim is to provide better connections and

increase cooperation between the emirate and its residents. It
promotes the use of government facilities using the largest possible
number of smart applications.

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Dubai Smart City initiative
Dubai as the “smartest city in the world”

Principles: Communication, integration and cooperation

Dubai Smart City Strategy

Transport Communications Infrastructure

Economic
Electricity Urban planning
services

100 Initiatives
1000 smart services

 New initiative to make Dubai a world hub for innovation

 Investing 4.5 Billion Dhs to transform Dubai Internet city and media city
into innovation and smart communities
 Aim: creating the “smartest” environment in the world for innovation
Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014
Dubai Smart City Initiative

 Silicon Park Project

 Dubai smart learning initiative

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Conclusions

 Vision and existence of an urban strategic plan is a must

 Stakeholders cooperation is key for data/information exchange

 A pragmatic approach to digital strategy should be considered

 Integrating the different OP systems and technologies is important

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014

Thank you

Arab Future Cities Summit, Dubai, 10-11 Nov 2014