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 agency looked at their own perspective only. Transport would just look at the transport perspective, municipality would look at theirs. We did not see the same image of our city.

It meant that we needed to build a digital urban planning platform for all of us. This was different from the KPIs that all the existing frameworks talked about. So, we moved from a set of KPIs into knowing that we wanted to redesign the city experiences and to give everyone managing the city a tool that would allow them to talk to each other and revisit the full city experience to enhance it. Instead of KPIs, we started to rethink the city from design thinking perspective to make sure the experiences would be happy ones.

Later, I pushed a lot to share our thinking and learnings and data widely, too. The data we came up with can be a tool for city managers from around the world to better understand how to uplift their cities to the desired level.

You Already Hinted a Bit about It, but Did You Hesitate at All When Taking the Job of Leading the SDO?

There were some challenges; sure.

It is not easy when you work with an existing infrastructure. In Dubai and in UAE, we have a young infrastructure and do not really have legacies. But it is still not a greenfield context. There was and is a brownfield context also with existing executives and leaders who were leading their sectors, such as mobility or transportation, business or health or education.

It is not an easy job for a woman like me to go knocking on the door of each organization responsible for their sector, telling them to open their infrastructure, to plug their infrastructure in with our infrastructure. Each one of them has their own CEO, and they think they have a solution. Yes, it may be the best solution for their own sector, but not necessarily the best solution for the whole city. This was one of the challenges.

The other was how to put up a budget for such a project. His Highness the Ruler said that Dubai had invested so much in our infrastructure, and he was sure that we had enough. He was sure about what was already there in our city, and he was right. The additional funds came later when we started the uptake of the next, fourth industrial revolution technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain. At the beginning, we had to instead connect the existing systems in our city and that did not need that much of a budget. His Highness also said that we first needed to make sure we understood what we requested. That is why we spent the first months on a real exploration finding out what we had here in our city and what the next steps could be.

Maybe it is part of my character to love challenges, so I did not hesitate much after all. This also part of what we have learned from our leadership here in Dubai: any day that does not have a challenge, we do not count it as a day.

Given These Challenges, Did You Have Any Requests Going In?

It was not a condition per se, but part of what I presented to His Highness the Ruler and to the Executive Committee was that we needed to have champions in all the government, semi-government, and private sector entities to work directly with us and have dual reporting lines. If we wanted to reach our goals, we needed to run in a very high-speed mode, different from the existing government mode.

Although Dubai has been known as the Dubai Inc. government for the way we operate as almost like a private sector, what we needed for smart city building was a very fast decision-making process and a very fast access to the infrastructure in different government organizations. We needed all the CEOs of the government and city on the same page, in one platform and organization.

The idea behind this request was also to integrate efforts and to make the agendas clear in front of each other. The benefit of one organization would mean the benefits for everyone. We needed to become close to them to be able to deliver at speed, and that is what we achieved later thanks to everyone's cooperation.

What Was Your Own Motivation in Taking Up the Call by His Highness?

First of all, if His Highness asks you to join his team, you do not hesitate for a moment, because it is His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and the Ruler of Dubai's team. The leader who has disrupted how governments work and plan forever.

But it also was a dream come true for me to be part of the decision-making process in the government. What would be a better role than running the digital backbone and platform for the whole city? Knowing that the digitization had become a very necessary tool for any organization, whether it be in private or public sector.

My motivation also was that I would be the first woman there. This way, I would support my other female colleagues in the government to also grow and their career to advance.

To be honest, I also like to be challenged! I had just submitted the final draft of the strategy to His Highness and took a few days of break. My plan was to leave government to look after my mother and my daughter, as I had been away for a long time. I had even written my resignation letter already.

Then I received the call on my trip that His Highness had signed the strategy into effect and even signed the decree I had written to establish the Smart Dubai Office (SDO). I said it was great news and asked whom had he chosen to be the director general. I had suggested some names, but not my own.

That is when I heard that His Highness had said I should be the best person to lead it because I had led the strategy from the beginning. He saw how I was eager to bring the best of global knowledge to the table. I was blessed that His Highness had faith in me.

What Was the State of Digital Development in Dubai at the Time, and What Led You to Suggest Creating the SDO?

In 2003, the Dubai government issued a decree that we were to have a unified enterprise resource planning solution for the government to manage human resources and so on. No government entity could go and invest in its own separate solution. Similarly, in the same period, the e-Government Office was launched on the idea to unify all of government services. It ended up having only a unified website after the first eighteen months. It took them almost thirteen years to try and push organizations to move from offline to online and from informative services to transactional services, but not fully online.

Why did it take thirteen years? Because here in Dubai, we have both a centralized and decentralized government at once. We have centralized budget funds, but decentralized execution in different bodies with their own directions and strategies. They come and meet at the center only for funds. It had been difficult to maneuver and bring everyone on the same page.

This had been the main point of my PhD thesis—such kinds of change in any organization should be top-down with strong leadership that supports the change across the organization. This huge change will change the lifestyle of an organization, a city, or a government or a country. You cannot expect that to happen by agencies themselves. Transformation had not been given such a momentum in Dubai before; that is why SDO was necessary.

I knew that SDO and we needed to work in several layers and not only in technology. The technology part is the easiest part: you can bring in any vendor and they will build it for you. The main issue is people, processes, and decision-making. The challenge was in all these layers and to link each layer to the other.

What Was the Mandate for SDO and the Tools at Your Disposal to Make Change Happen?

The mandate really was to use technologies to enhance city experiences, to make our people happy—whether they are residents or visitors. It is very easy to state that but difficult to implement because of the layers explained.

The challenge first continued to be the same as it had been during the e-Government time. Each governmental organization was going ahead with its own plans to digitize their systems or enhance their tools or attract experts. We could not just go knocking on their doors. We had to show that we in SDO, we were experts in smart city topics. We also needed to be very humble and down-to-earth to show others that we were there to learn from them and see how we can benefit from their experience to help us in this new government body.

It helped us a lot that Smart Dubai project was very dear to His Highness and the Crown Prince. In any organization, if you want to be a successful leader and have a successful transformation project, you need to have a sponsor. A good sponsor is one of the main driving people of the organization or a city and someone who believes in you, who sees that you are the one who can succeed in that role, and gives you all the power and space to develop and to deliver the desired output.

That is how we got the champions across the government whom we selected. With sponsorship from the rulers, we had each of the leaders of each governmental body sign off that their nominated champion would be the person who could access anything, anytime just to fulfill the Smart Dubai strategy.

What Were the Very First Steps You Took When You Started Leading the SDO?

The first thing was to recruit. I did get an initial team of different consultants who worked with us; they were all outsourced. I needed to recruit a team of nationals, also grow them and have gender balance in the organization.

One of the main early activities was to sign all those agreements with other government entities and champions to make sure that they understood what we do. I was in daily meetings with the decision-makers in all these organizations, sometimes covering three layers of executives to make sure we became very close to them and that they embraced our vision.

I wanted them to talk the same language and to breathe the same air that we did in Smart Dubai. Because later, when we would start to implement the real projects, I wanted everyone to run at the same speed. We were going to have very tight deadlines and I did not want anyone to lag behind due to any miscommunication. That is why I was touring daily from one organization to another.

It was also important to rent us a space for an office that could reflect our identity. A space to show that the smart city is not only technology; it is a new lifestyle, whether in business or in leisure. We needed to embrace that new lifestyle in our office space. A new district was coming out in Dubai, called the Design District. I had suggested to a friend leading its development that the district could be the first green and smart one in Dubai, with sensors and data collection everywhere to see everything happening in the district. SDO became an early mover to this area. Our idea was to be a showcase to anyone visiting our office to help them feel and touch how could technology help us on a daily basis.

We paid a lot of attention to the design of the office itself. We did a huge search among global organizations to see how they had managed to build a successful atmosphere in their organization. At the end of the day, it is not the colorful Google offices but the fabric of the environment and culture inside Google that makes it successful. The culture is within people who will be working in that space as an office, so who can be better than them to design their own offices? Many of our recruits were young and that affected the design of walls, doors, desks, even toilets—everything. We made it 100 percent different from the way offices were designed previously.

What Was the Focus or Core of the Strategy You Had Laid Out and Started Delivering—What Were the Steps for Building Up a Smart City for Happiness?

We designed the strategy for two phases. First was to be three years, from 2015 to 2017, and focused on making sure that all the infrastructure and regulation was going to be up and ready. Second phase then, from 2017 to the end of 2021, was to build on these, to really transform the city, the society, the economy from services, transactions, and data perspective.

In infrastructure, we aimed to create a digital backbone for the city—to have a full stack of new infrastructure designed from blueprint to enable Dubai to grow without any limitations and on open standards so that any kind of new technologies could be plugged into it. We made sure not to be tied to any specific technology or big vendors as such.

We also designed a new business model and a law for government and the private sector to join in public-private partnerships, or PPP. We also had to get in place the previously lacking proper regulation about data: from understanding what we meant by data to classifying data, making sure that data storage and dissemination was to be well documented, and so on. We then had to train government on that new regulation; we even got some degree courses out there. We made some regulations concerning open source, cloud, the internet-of-things.

How Did You Embrace New Things That Must Have Emerged along the Way? Did You Ever Adjust the Strategy?

New things did emerge along the way, such as blockchain and AI, that came from nowhere to the picture. We needed to make sure to plug them with the other stack we were building up. It was easier because we had different teams running different projects, so focus and delivery of overall strategy did not suffer. For example, we had a special team looking at next technologies and scanning the horizon—next to the backbone team, the data team, the strategy team.

Blockchain is a good example of how we adjusted our strategies. We first took it to testing in the Future Accelerator that the Executive Office had set up to embrace new technologies and have Dubai as a hub to implement all these new ideas. We took a small project to see if blockchain could actually help us. The project was about converting all the settlement and reconciliation of the government accounts into the blockchain platform. Citizens pay all public bills to one unified count; the government distributes it in the back end. We got a small start-up from Dubai to help us, and they took a previous forty-five-day process down to a zero-time settlement. A great gain in efficiency.

We took that example and started mapping all the use cases across the government that blockchain could be applicable for, plus we did desktop research and study visits to see how other countries had done it. We mapped some forty use cases and ended up putting a deadline of two years to implement everything in our government with blockchain. Then we found through the implementation that not everything can be applicable for blockchain. So, we changed the direction of our strategy and focused on applicable services only. In this work, we also saw we needed to design procedures, policies, and regulation—for example, for operating a unified blockchain platform for the government.

You see how new directions started from having a team scanning the horizon. They had to suggest a proper strategy, a plan of execution for experimentation. Based on this we could plug it into the existing strategy or road map on a yearly basis.

At the end of every year, we would sit with SDO management team and revisit our strategy to reflect the changing realities. Such reauthorization of strategy was also important because our understanding of what a smart city is would evolve. Every year, we would start to understand more and become more mindful about what can be successful and what cannot be done. This openness and transparency to be able to reshape made the strategy all the more applicable to be implemented—rather than having a very nice, shiny strategic document only.

Many organizations shy away from revisiting their strategy, because they think it might imply that they did not understand what they put in the strategy before. Instead, the revisiting means we understand better now because of our experience! That is why we made the revisiting mandatory.

It was done as a three-day retreat with all the directors in the organization. The one condition to be there was to remove your heart from the department you were in. I did not want any emotional attachment to any projects when entering that room. Otherwise, if we decided to pause some projects, the people leading would feel we did not want them—which was not the case.

You Spent the First Months on Daily Tour to Build Relationship with Other Agencies. How Did You Sustain These Relationships Later?

At the beginning, when I was doing those tours across the government, we spoke to the CEOs plus the CIOs. I wanted to make sure the CEO himself believes in our mission, so that his CIO who already believed in us could support us. That opened a new door for me personally to be able to be very close with those CEOs.

Whenever we later wanted anything to be implemented in our city, it often took just a phone call with the CEOs to get to implement a thing. We did not need any of those protocols or procedures to convince anyone or send letters.

By the way, this helped us a lot once when the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country in 2020. We had three days to test all the systems and make sure that during the weekend everything was ready to convert the government from physical to online work. This was possible only with the support of all the CEOs.

We did not work with the CEOs as a group too officially, more from a casual perspective. This was on purpose, as I wanted to show that when we would implement smart systems, our lives become easier and our communication should be much easier. If we wanted changes in our communities and environment, we also had to change how we related and worked as CEOs.

Every year, we did an international visit together with government entity CIOs. It was like a retreat, but for learning. Every year we chose a different topic and a different destination—depending on the topics we had at hand in our journey. Or we went to an event like the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, where we could sit down with all the cities attending the summit. These trips were a way to bring CIOs onboard, uplift them from a knowledge perspective to see the new technologies the way we saw it, and also enable them to share their knowledge from their sector—be it health or mobility.

How Did You Attract Talent to Join You in SDO?

I surely utilized my brand, my personal brand, to attract young stars to our teams. We shared our activities and day-to-day SDO life through social media, showcasing everything we did—also on my personal accounts. I do have a lot of followers from our country, but not only from there. I had been one of the early adopters of social media in our community, when Twitter and Facebook were just starting back in the day.

This way people started to know what I was doing and what were the positive changes we were doing. A lot of junior and also some senior directors came through such social media interactions.

The main philosophy in this area was to walk the talk. We wanted to show people that when government said that we want the future to be implemented today, that we in SDO were living it today.

I had gathered some following already before—as I am from Dubai and the business community—and they keep talking to each other closely. They had noticed that there was this lady doing things, had high values, and was brave. This combined with our being very transparent in SDO started to grow our name and to change the perspective of people on how public servants can work different. We made our image to be close to the simple people in the street, aimed at changing the image among young people at schools and universities on the perspective about working in government.

We also got people to join the mission from largest consultancy companies and from Facebook and Google to help us redesign a city experience. Several of the people who joined us were from the Middle East but living in the US or Europe. They got to know us through conferences, liked the mission, and they just sent their CVs to be with us.

What Qualities Were You Looking for in Your Hiring?

I always told people that we need to be human first. People in the ICT sector tend to forget sometimes that they are human at the end of the day, that we are not robots. We are requested to digitize systems, but we are also the people who will benefit from this digitization. Thus, we need to see these systems from the perspective of human eyes first rather than from IT analyst or strategist eyes.

I also had to make sure that the team members saw the vision and mission of our organization when selecting them. When I recruited senior team members, I did not care about their specialty degrees. The most important part was if they believed that we could change things through ICT. The main thing was if they were enthusiastic about using these tools to make positive changes in our communities.

Who Was Your Most Valuable Hire?

One of them was Zeina El Kaissi, who joined as the Chief Digital Director. She had worked with me in my previous role in the Dubai Executive Office, then started her own IT solutions company. Once I had been assigned to run Smart Dubai, I called her to tell we had a new challenge and mission and to see if she wanted to join. Immediately, she jumped onboard and was one of the main members in the decision-making layer in Smart Dubai. She handled our strategy, and she was like a joker in the playing cards that you can throw anywhere, given the way she thought with her consultancy experience. She could always read the reality and then suggest where to go forward.

Another key team member was a younger guy named Hamad Alawadhi. He handled the network platform and was responsible for our communication and connecting to all the government entities. He had a civic engineer background, a master's degree from Imperial College in London. But he was so fond of the happiness agenda and how we could spread positiveness and happiness with proper communication with people. I immediately recruited him for it and handed him a special project on championing the platform, building human relations with others.

Can You Tell Some More on What Was the Culture You Were Trying to Create in SDO?

There are some very integral values that are close to my heart. I personally do believe in transparency and openness between the teams, and especially in the same organization. I do think that there is no shame in copying and pasting, as long as we know where we are pasting it and understand what we are copying in the context of adopting successful examples. I also do believe that there is no shame when you work yourself to the ground, because if you work you will make mistakes. Better to say that we did a mistake, and this is the way how we rectified these mistakes, than not to try.

To have a healthy organization, you need to have trust with your people, or your system, and with other agencies and members. So, trust is another value that I emphasize. I cannot work with teams that I do not trust, and if they do not trust me—if I want to run with them in this race and win the race. Our race was to reach our deadlines. That is why trust was a very essential part of our philosophy.

In addition to these values, we needed to bring the change mindset to the front. Of course, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum had started in the mid-1990s to revamp the Dubai government and have an enterprise or Dubai Inc. mindset—so that everyone in the government should have that entrepreneurial spirit. I wanted to change Dubai to be in continuous change: that we would always continue to change how we did things for the benefit of our people, the citizens and residents.

What Were Your Mantras That You Kept Repeating to Your Team?

I often said: be human! When you are in your organization, do not forget that at the end of the day, we are all human. We need to take care of our people in this organization. I have grown up the ladder myself; I was very junior in the organization when I joined the government in 1994. I have seen how people can be treated as juniors, and that is why I made sure that every single senior person in our organization had a proper human relationship with colleagues and teams.

Another aspect about being human is that, as a public servant, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of citizens or residents. Public servants tend to forget at the end of the day that they will receive the same services that they provided during the day. Think about how you want to be treated if you are not part of the service organization. That is why each time we designed a system or a service, we brought in employees from across the organization to shape the design of the service, in addition to going out of the organization to the ground and listening to people.

“Listen with an open mind and heart,” we said. Normally as a public servant, we are so attached to our services, we fight when the client says the service is bad. Just listen to them and go to the ground and test! I find that many of the government leaders, the CEOs themselves, they have never tested their own services. Their office will handle everything for them. Leading the organization, you need to know your kitchen, you need to draw the process maps and know exactly how things are cooked and what is going on. That is why I made sure that everyone in our organization, in SDO, they had less ego and were very down-to-earth when it came to the services that they provided. That they would be very open-minded to listen and hear others to be ready to revisit our services and processes.

What Were Your Regular Practices or Routines to Act on These Values or Make Delivery Happen?

It was important to be there myself with the team as necessary. One of the things in our office was that the walls were made of glass so that everyone could see each other. The team could always reach me; I was always there: whether in the office or WhatsApp or any of my social media accounts. This enabled me to put more pressure on them to deliver. Because they knew I would always be there if needed.

Speed was our pressure. I needed the team who could run with me. They needed to believe in me under the pressure. They needed to see that I was there 24/7, so I did reply to their requests, emails, calls immediately as soon as I could.

We had a policy in the meetings that anyone could attend any meeting. Register at least half an hour before, and we would make sure you have a seat. If it is with external members, listen in during the meeting—if you have anything to ask, ask at the end. This opened more doors for the people to understand what happened around them. Imagine you are in this organization and working very hard, then suddenly there is a new project or success, and you hear about in the newspaper or radio only. This will kill the enthusiasm in your heart that made you every early morning come to work and join this organization. So I made sure that everyone in the organization believed and felt that they were an important part of the of the organization.

We also needed to be happy employees to make the lives of people happier. That is why we took leisure trips together or went to events, also outside the country. Or we would go biking or sailing. Some of these things were going on every weekend, also with families. Happy employees could present this vision to the others, and they would believe it more if they saw it in us.

In the last years, we implemented the tribe and holacracy models.² That changed the mood for later-stage deliverables. People who used to punch in at 7 am and punch out 3 pm, they started working as if they were new people—as soon as they saw that each one of them was valued and could contribute. I had to send people dinner to their office or ask them to go home!

We went for the tribe approach to have a very fast way to deliver even small deliverables all the time. It was also a way to make sure that management needed to interfere only if necessary. No need to interfere if things were going right anyway. This was also a way to allow for experimentation, to have teams go and have a space to implement and test what works.

What Were Your Biggest Achievements as the Director General, in Your Own View?

Building a livable digitalization and our Smart City blueprint.

I am proud of having had and built this strong team in Smart Dubai that was a team like never seen before in Dubai. They came from different nationalities, from different entities, but believed in the same goal. They were like fire, every day and night, just to make sure they implemented things. They were really building things for themselves. Like one of the teams that worked on registering the buying and selling of cars in the city. They tested it with their own cars: one sold his car to the other guy through the system. I saw how powerful and happy these tiny teams of enthusiasts were when they achieved a change, even if small.

We surely also achieved for Dubai making a mark on the global digital transformation agenda. It was a huge achievement to become one of the cities that has managed to transform its own systems and experiences in this way.

My third accomplishment is a very personal one—understanding and believing in myself that I can change my own skin to grow this organization and at such a speed.

What Prompted You to Move Ahead from Smart Dubai after Five Years in 2021?

I had been working and in government mostly for the last twenty-eight years; I never had a break. Even for summer vacations, I took one week at best. My mom had started to need me more as she was getting older, and I did not want to lose the chance to be close to her. My daughter is grown now; she is twenty-two and started her own business. I also wanted to start a new journey with myself, therefore.

I learned from Smart Dubai that I need to be open-minded and transparent also with myself to see where are the nodes that I need to expand in my own way of thinking and my own body. I started on a personal growth journey—with meditation, lots of yoga, learning new things about my own self. Started a new hobby of tennis; I had never held a racket before! I am still a member in many areas of the city management, but my main time is for me now.

How Did You Prepare for the Handover and Making Sure Your Initiatives Would Live On?

New management groups surely come and have their own agendas; they will change the work at the end of the day. But I made sure that the teams themselves were mature enough to deal with such change so that the systems could adapt.

What Were—or Are—Going to Be Next Challenges for the Team and Smart Dubai?

There still is delivery to be done to meet the initially set deadlines.

Also, I tried to push in the last five years that IT is not just IT. Normally IT is seen as a support function, right? In Smart Dubai, IT is a digital platform that can change the whole perspective of the business—it can push you up or kill you. Either satisfy your client or lose your client.

In my role, I was not just paying attention to the deliverables per se, but the philosophy and way of life across government about how to see IT people. That they are not there to provide you cables and Wi-Fi and troubleshoot—they are the masters of reshaping the business. This idea of IT still needs cultivating to last.

What Do You Wish You Had Known When You Started the Job? What Do You Think You Learned the Most?

I learned to be more open-minded and not to judge things upfront, especially when new technologies or ideas or systems are being presented to me. Before, I used to shut down often in these cases. In Smart Dubai, I learned to listen, to allow others to elaborate more, to showcase and to convince others. If they are convinced, then the issue is with me and not with the technology or idea itself.

So, I pushed myself more into practicing this new way of thinking or seeing things in a more open-minded and in less judgmental way. I also see it more in my own life now, as my daughter has grown up from being a teenager to an adult and starting her own business now. I have learned to let her go by supporting her and trusting her.

What Do You Think Are the Key Skills One Needs to Do Your Kind of Role Well?

To be passionate, first of all. Passionate about the sector or area that you want to grow in.

Be open-minded.

When they say that we need to have new skills such as coding or understanding of data, these you can learn in any school or training. One of the major issues that we will face is how to work in teams and to let go your own perspective. We—and especially our kids—they need to understand the need to work in collaboration with others. We cannot work in isolation from others. The moment you say, “I want to work in collaboration with others” you need to have this kind of setup in the brain to accept the others, their ideas, or their ways. Even if it conflicts with your own ideas, you need to reach to a point wherein we can both survive or live or work in the same space.

What Are Your Three Recommendations from Your Experience—What Does It Take to Do a Digital Government Leader's Job Well?

Have the project or program close to the main decision-maker in that city or government—have a proper sponsor or a champion, have it in his or her daily dashboard.

Have champions all over the organization who do believe in the vision. This will expediate change.

Revisit the road map and the strategy. Not every three years, but every year. The speed and the momentum of changes that are happening today are much faster than they used to be. Do not feel shy and embarrassed to do changes, even if you change the direction from east to west.