To be Smart, governments needs to look beyond making their services available on mobile devices. It means understanding citizen's needs and designing services accordingly. Multiple technologies need to be used to design and deliver such experiences.

1. Smart Government means going beyond mobile
With Expo 2020 on the cards, Dubai rolled out Smart Government initiative. But
what exactly is Smart Government?
Smart Government is the ability of a government to "Understand" the said/unsaid
needs of its Customers (Citizens/Residents/Visitors); "design" solutions to address
those needs; and "deliver" the solution effectively.
Vision of Dubai Smart Government (DSG) reads as below:
“Ease the lives of people and businesses interacting with the government and
contribute to establishing Dubai as a leading economic hub.”
I would give a 10 on 10 for this Vision as it talks of adding value to its Customers
(people and businesses). It sounds magical to the ears, but what all is needed to ease
lives of so many people?
Commendable work has been done by Dubai Government in line with the vision.
Most of it revolves around delivering services through mobile devices. Every day we
see government organizations launching mobile applications. But is it enough to
provide services through mobile? Maybe yes, maybe no! Let us talk a bit about
Customer Experience (CX) to understand this further.
Customer Experience has 3 levels1. Functional - Do you have what customers need?
2. Accessible - How easy it is to do business with you?
3. Emotional - How do customers feel when they do business with you? – This is
the differentiator, attribute which differentiates “Good companies” from
“Great companies”, “Good governments” from “Great governments”.
Providing services through mobile, is about increasing accessibility for some
customers, addition of one more channel. I am not sure if it has the power of easing
lives to a huge extent. We at Finesse believe that Dubai Government needs to take a
more holistic approach of “Customer Experience Management (CXM)” to achieve
the “Vision”.
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is actively managing the
experiences delivered to customers at various touch-points. It starts by mapping a
customer’s journey with the organization. In the case of Dubai government, there are
various customers like Citizens, Residents, Visitors and Businesses.
As an example, below is a brief of a Visitors journey with Dubai. (Diagram shows very
few touch-points for illustration only)

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Figure
1:
Visitor
Journey
Mapping
Once the journey is mapped, key touch-points are identified. Detailed Customer
Experience Strategy is then designed for these touch-points. It involves defining
the exact experience, which the Government wishes to deliver to people. CX Strategy
is extremely important to ensure consistent experiences. Once the experience is
defined, work needs to be done backwards on people, process and technology to
deliver the experience. CXM would help Dubai Government to create advocacy and
further establish Dubai among businesses and investors.
Technologies for Smart Transformation
Dubai Government needs to look at various technologies as well, to deliver the
“transformational experience”.
1. Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing has immense potential. It has been proved time and again, starting
from Goldcorp challenge and cleanup of Gulf of Alaska 20 years after Exxon Valdez
spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Prince of Sound.
Government in US is using crowdsourcing in intelligent ways.
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US Army created a portal armycocreate asking citizens to come up with
situations, soldiers could encounter. Once people come up with a situation,
they design a solution and army takes it further.
US navy created an online gaming portal mmowgli. Players are attacked by

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pirates in the game. The strategies players use to escape the pirates are
assessed by the navy. Learning from these strategies are used to tackle the
Somali pirate problem.
US revenue department crowdsourced ideas to use taxpayer’s money
more effectively. They got more than 40,000 responses and the top ideas were
implemented.
US State department and US Health department outsource small tasks
to citizens, certainly an intelligent way to crowdsource man-hours.
Crowdsourcing by Governments helps in finding out-of-the-box solutions to
situations, as well as in creating connected citizens.
Dubai Government can crowdsource ideas to solve traffic woes, water logging in
rains, address issues of illegal workforce, maintain law and order to name a few.
2. Big Data
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Use of Big data in President Barack Obama's re-election campaign has
resulted in further traction for Big Data. It is absolutely amazing to see how
data was sliced to understand human behaviour. Data crunchers noticed
that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females
ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group
most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney.
They used this insight to collect millions of dollars. Many such insights were
discovered and the team managed to collect donations above $ 1 billion. Every
night election campaign was run 66,000 times to see the chances of Obama
winning the campaign.
Another interesting use of Big data is by New York City. Using Big data,
Mayor of New York revolutionised the inspection of buildings. More than
450,000 buildings in New York city were old and prone to fire. It was difficult
for a department with strength of 200 to inspect these buildings. The Mayor's
office resorted to big data. Various factors like sub-tenancy, crowding in
building, timeliness of bill-payments by landlords, reporting of rodents/pests,
latest brick-work etc. were studied. A list of 1500 buildings was prepared.
When Firemen visited these buildings, they had to order evacuation in 70% of
them. The hit rate improved considerable from 17% earlier. This resulted in
pre-empting a disaster.
Center for disease control (CDC) studies big data every year to decide
the concoction of flu vaccine for a particular year.
Organisations like Target and Amazon use big data to predict customer
behaviour. Kayak, the airline aggregator uses big data to predict the future
prices of airline tickets and suggest customers if they should buy right away or
hold their decision for a few days.
Apart from using big data to address routine challenges, Dubai government
should look at using big data for Expo 2020. One way is to understand delegate
behaviour from Expo 2015 - Their demographics, likes for each demographics, things
they liked/not-liked, things they wished for in the expo. With all these insights, the
experience for Expo 2020 can be actively designed to wow the delegated and create
advocacy for Dubai.
3. Internet of Things

4. Sensors are attached to things and these sensors can transmit information. RFID is
one such traditional example. These sensors are connected and hence represent
"Internet of things".
In coming years, having sensors in things would transform everything. Imagine an
infrastructure that can sense, collect data and transmit data to a source.
Currently it has been used in some interesting ways world over•
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Tweeting bus tops in Norway - Kolumbus bus stops in Norway have QR
codes. On scanning the code, travellers get the details of buses and routes.
They can share their experiences, their stories, and whatever they share is
tweeted world over.
Tagging rubbish in Seattle - 3000 pieces of rubbish were tagged in Seattle
to understand waste management. Several insights were observed as a result.
It was found that a printer cartridge travelled more than 6000 miles to reach
a location to disposed in an environment friendly way. The travel completely
negated the effort to dispose it. There is a need for municipalities to look at
ways to dispose hazardous waste much closer. When such data is shared with
people, it can lead to change in behaviour and adoption of green methods by
citizens.
Lamp posts in Birmingham - Weather department has attached sensors
to lamp posts in Birmingham. These sensors capture weather information and
transmit it to weather department, enabling them to forecast local weather.
Tree tags in London - Project is launched in London to attach sensors to
trees. Objective is to educate visitors and tell stories about trees in different
ways.
I cannot wait to see how Citizen experience would transform when whole city
infrastructure would have sensors. I could foresee traffic density on my route and
plan accordingly. Governments would be able to monitor security, health,
infrastructure, and almost anything.
Technology has immense capabilities; governments just need to resist using them
haphazardly. Need of the day is to "define experience desired" and then look at
the technologies that can deliver that experience. UAE is ideally placed to be the first
country to look at the people’s experience in this way and use “technology” in line
with the strategy. Categorization of services as per customer journey on dubai.ae is a
step in that direction.
We at Finesse can integrate all these technologies needed to ease lives of people in
any country.