Questions/Answers

The vision of Abu Dhabi Municipality has always been to shape an Emirate with a sustainable integrated urban development and to be provider for outstanding municipal services for the welfare and happiness of its society. The municipality has created its plan in alignment with the Government’s 2030 vision to support the sustainable growth of the Emirate while managing urban development and providing the communities with the higher level of municipal services to ensure the constant leverage of their lifestyle. The Three Dimensions’ Digital Transformation Initiative has been launched by the municipality based on a comprehensive 360 plan to leverage and make Intelligent use of current advanced ICT in order to contribute to the Emirate’s Strategic Plans and ensure value chain optimization through collaboration, automation & fast Access to services and information. The Initiative has three focus areas or dimensions that aim for various objectives. These dimensions are: • The Customer Services dimension that aims to provide faster, easier and cheaper services to related Citizens & Businesses. • The City dimension which that to provide clean, green and secure city for the citizen/Inhabitants of Abu Dhabi • The Internal workplace dimension that aims to provide productive, efficient and smart work environment for internal workforce

Technology plays a vital role in enabling and achieving business objectives. The various deployments that have been applied under this initiative are all technology deployments that focus on digitizing the municipality operations and collaboration with other Government entities to enable the integration and knowledge/Information transfer for simplifying the customers experience, Improve the city services delivery, reduced the cost of providing these services and enhance quality of life for citizens by reducing the pollution, improving the economy, and raising people happiness.

The initiative is contributing to the 2030 agenda of sustainable developments and indirect realization of its goals of “DECENT WORK AND ECONOMIC GROWTH” and “SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES” through various factors such as: • Operations Automation and efficiency enhancements • Enabling E-Government, • Utilization of green and sustainable technology infrastructure • leveraging IOT technologies for monitoring water, lights, soil, pollution, etc. • Reducing traffic and cars CO2 emissions • Save the forests by minimizing the use of papers • Enhance economic growth through expediting the permits for buildings & city infrastructure construction.

The initiative has introduced different positive impacts on various groups of people. These groups are directly and indirectly uses or benefits from the municipality services. These groups are: • The direct customers group who chase direct service requests from the municipality. • The citizen/inhabitants group who lives in the city of Abu Dhabi and indirectly benefit from the municipality’s public services. • and the internal employees group who work for the municipality and benefits from the digitization and operational enhancements through technology deployments. The full transformation of the municipality services into digital services (Total 381 active services) has directly benefited the customers by eliminating their need to physically come to the municipality in order to obtain their services as they can easily complete their requests through an internally developed e-services platform called (Smart Hub), Mobile application or remote Kiosks. The transformation has also reduced the cost of obtaining these services as they don’t need to leave their work to visit the municipality. In addition, the supporting documents required to obtain the services are no longer required since the systems’ integration with other relevant Government entities has exchanged all needed documents (Such as Marital Status, passport info, family book, Driving License, etc.)

The innovation of the initiative varies between the approach in transforming the municipality operations through the three dimensions as well as the employment of various advanced technologies to enable this transformation. The municipality, with its internal resources, has developed an advanced smart digital services platform that is also integrated with most relevant government entities. The platform uses the artificial intelligence technology to do smart valuation of lands and Real-estate’s services. In addition, the municipality has used the mobile technology, IOT and smart cameras to simplify the inspection of the city and expedite the correction of all distortions and violations.

The innovation is original as the smart digital platform has been developed internally by the municipality employees in a unique framework using latest technologies. In addition, the municipality enabled all citizens to contribute to the city image by using their smart phones to share any distortion they find in the city and send them to the municipality through mobile application service (Rased). For the first time in the region, the municipality has launched a comprehensive IOT project that monitors various utilities in public areas and send important information to the back-office for simpler and more effective decision making.

Yes. Various solutions of the initiative have been transferred and adapted by various Government entities including Al-Ain City, Al-Dhafra region in Abu Dhabi, and Department of transport. • They have adapted the digital transformation project for the services as there are 100% similarity of the municipal services. • In addition, they adapted the citizen case management platform as a unified system for citizens’ cases, suggestions, complaints and information. • The two sister municipalities have also rolled out the Mobile inspection management system for capturing and correction of city distortions. • Department of transport has adapted the internal process automation and digitization platform.

The municipality has utilized internal Human capabilities to do the digital transformation of its services. The dependency on external support was limited to some outsourced developers. The fund of the initiative was allocated by the Government where total cost of ownership of the whole initiative reached 40.3 Million dirhams including the outsourced resources, internal FTEs, hardware, software, training and professional services. Moreover, the municipality has made use of other Government departments’ resources to collaborate in integrating some business support systems and knowledge transfer to enable a full digital transformation.

The initiative has impact on sustainability from four aspects: Social: • The initiative reflected positively on the level of satisfaction and ease stress on Customers/Citizens • Customers are paying less for their services, as some documents will be electronically provided through the integrated government program. • Approximately 280,000 hours of driving were reduced annually. Economic: • Saving this customer time from visiting the municipality have saved them approximately 960,000 working hours with an annual estimated value of AED 86 million. • The cost of transportation (fuel, parking, consumption, etc.) will reach low levels and are considered indirect savings. • Reducing construction Permits time from more than 100 days to 5 days has a great impact on economy, attracted investors and raised employment opportunities. Environmental • The initiative reduced city traffic and reduces an estimated 1078 tons of CO2 emissions from vehicles movements. • The papers used to perform municipal transactions has been reduced by an approximate total of 9.5 million sheets a year. • Reducing paperwork saved approximately 1300 trees a year. Operational: • Municipal services are provided to clients quickly and self-reliably. The shift has also helped in reducing human errors. • Self-service through digital channels helped reducing the workload of municipal employees by 120,000 working hours annually.

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The initiative had various projects which were separately evaluated. The evaluation took place along with related stakeholders by identifying the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each project and then identifying the direct and indirect benefits which were realized from each deployment. Having the net benefits identified, then we measured the NPV of these projects over 5 years and finally calculating the expected Return on Investment (ROI), Payback period of the project, as well as the internal rate of return (IRR). Moreover, the customers' satisfaction was also considered as part of the evaluation.

During the evaluation of the initiative, we have looked at various direct financial indicators as well as indirect environmental, social and economic benefits obtained from the projects. Some of the indicators are: • Total Cost of ownership • Return on investment (ROI) • Internal rate of return (IRR) • Payback period • Reduction in CO2 footprint • Reduction in papers consumption • Increase in employees’ efficiency • Saved customers time • Customers satisfaction • Reduction in driving hours • Number of saved trees • Number of increase in transactions • Reduction in customers’ complaints • Reduction in city distortions and violation cases

The evaluation outcome has been identified for various projects under the initiative. A project like the Mobile city inspection has achieved a 1218% ROI within a year of its launch while the digitization of city’s infrastructure design approval services has achieved a 5 years cumulative ROI equal to 4340%. Moreover, there were benefits evaluation for customer services’ digital transformation where some annual results came to be as follows: • Reduced CO2 emissions: 1,078,608,600.00 gms • Time saved for Customers: 958,763.20 Hours • Value of the saved customers time: 86M AED • Saved Driving minutes: 16,778,356.00 • Papers saved: 9,587,632.00 Sheets • Saved employees Time: 119,845.40 Hours

The initiative was build and designed in coordination with multiple stakeholders including The Executive council of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, Department of finance, The department of Urban Planning, Abu Dhabi Smart solutions and services authority (ADSSSA), Abu Dhabi Waste management company, Telecommunication Companies, Civil defense, Abu Dhabi Judicial department, and many others. The roles vary between all stakeholders where: • The Executive council is the Government’s high level sponsor for the initiative and the observer for its value. • Department of Finance is the fund provider for the initiative. • ADSSSA plays the role of the guidelines and standards maker as well the facilitator of the government to Government integration in order to enable the knowledge/Information transfer between the entities. • Department of Urban planning & Municipalities is the regulatory authority of the emirate’s municipalities and plays the role of a regulator as well as initiative owner • Other Government & Semi Government entities role are to enable and support the initiative through the integration with their systems and facilitate the information exchange in order to simplify the customer journey in obtaining their services and responding back to related city distortions correction. • Internal municipality departments role to re-engineer and automate their back-office business processes.

The Three Dimensions’ Digital transformation initiative launched and executed by Abu Dhabi municipality through several phase. The initiative has faced up and downs during the long journey of execution and can summarize its top lessons learned as follows: • It can’t be completed alone and always need to engage all stakeholders from the initiation phase • It is very important to ask for customers’ feedback, opinion and preference before starting execution. • Awareness and marketing of the new transformation is equally important to its execution • Finishing the project is not the end. There should always be improvements and upgrades to obtain best results.