Digital Dubai
            

Digital Dubai is the Dubai government office charged with facilitating the city’s smart transformation. It empowers, delivers and promotes an efficient, seamless, safe and personalized experience for residents and visitors via initiatives such as going entirely paperless, measuring and prioritizing happiness, and using technologies like AI and blockchain. Its smart apps are innovative masterpieces, including those that let people: rate the things that make them happy, manage their digital identity and signatures, acquire a new business license and much more.

Dubai is a city whose very name represents innovation and smart government agility. Over the past 20 years, it has built a thriving and diversified economy around financial, investment, tourism and other service-based industries by making resident happiness and visitor experience top priorities.

Dubai’s leadership recognized decades ago that it not only needed to invest in technology, but a government office was required to lead the effort. Named Digital Dubai—establishing it was a stroke of genius. The new office quickly moved to reduce complexity and streamline backend communication and integration between Dubai Government entities to reduce friction and enable new innovation.

Dubai had dozens of independent apps, offering residents and visitors a wide array of services at the touch of a screen. Wisely, Digital Dubai saw the opportunity to even further improve user experience while also cutting costs.

In a strategic partnership with Software AG and webMethods, Digital Dubai was able to truly connect everything. By building a unified integration backbone starting in 2020, with API, BPMS and automation support layers, Digital Dubai began enhancing services on streamlined mobile apps, self-service kiosks and more, replacing in-person visits for things such as acquiring a new business license.

That’s why, when a global pandemic took the world by surprise, Dubai did something no other city could: Keep its government services seamlessly available to residents and visitors online. “We were able to provide all of our services, even through the worst times of the lockdown, because we’d invested in the technology,” says Smart Dubai Government Establishment, Digital Dubai CEO H.E. Wesam Lootah.

Attracting global investment

For years, Dubai has had resident and visitor apps for nearly everything: electricity and water, health, reporting and awarding customer experiences, and far more. What it didn’t have was the architectural platform to allow interconnectedness on the backend, smooth journeys for users and faster adoption of new technologies.

So in 2018, Digital Dubai took its technology to new heights by implementing webMethods as an integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). It quickly built a hub to integrate all government entities, impacting everything from its paperless initiative, to making Dubai the happiest city in the world.

Just four months after it started the project, Digital Dubai went live exposing government service APIs for unified mobile apps and more. And it did so just in time. When the COVID pandemic hit, Digital Dubai and webMethods kept government services running smoothly and safely—at the tap of a mobile screen.

Building on this success, Digital Dubai released the Invest In Dubai (IID) platform in February 2021. Within months the total number of business registration and licensing transactions reached over 5,000, including over 3,500 commercial business licenses and more than 1,500 trade names. Digitally. Remotely. And at record speed.

The reach of the program is staggering. Investors from 77 different countries were attracted by IID, with data showing that 9,181 jobs were created by businesses for whom licenses were issued.

Dashboarding smiles

Best of all, the webMethods iPaaS is helping Dubai’s leadership visualize and monitor key KPIs associated with all of Dubai’s initiatives. This means that live information on happiness, customer experiences, resident and visitor journeys, and more is fed from the platform to critical webMethods dashboards, in real time. Now, Dubai’s leadership can see, decide and act—so people can thrive.

With a unified hub in place, the sky is the limit. There are many customer journeys planned to launch on the platform. That means seamless apps, instead of chaos, and operational costs that would make any CFO a hero.

That’s how Digital Dubai has helped make Dubai the best place to live. And now, the best place to invest or start a new business anywhere in the world. With exciting plans built around data-first, blockchain and AI, and a laser focus on cleantech initiatives like going paperless, the world capital of ambition is open for business. And full of smiles.