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