Mohamed Al Askar, Director General, Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA) • Interview
ADDA leads the general transformation journey of the government of Abu Dhabi, helping to set the direction and foundation and provide the guidelines.
What measures did ADDA take to ensure the organization could handle any kind of crisis?
Digitalization has been a key enabler in dealing with this pandemic, and we were fortunate that our digital journey started a long time ago. Our leadership has always advocated for providing services online, and today 100% of our services are available online. During the pandemic, we found ourselves ready, with all the ingredients in place to deal with it. As an organization, we provide our entire team with security guidelines as well as channels for secure communications for sensitive topics and data. When the pandemic occurred initially, productivity increased, especially when we worked from home. It was for us a big nudge in terms of dealing with digital transformation. We even had further digital acceleration during this period and released new CRM and ADP systems. All of this helped us to deal with the situation much better, and we were fortunate that we invested in this early on. Compared to other countries, we were ahead in terms of dealing with the situation. Now, we are back in our offices, and while some team members remain working from home, we still engage and collaborate, so productivity is booming.
Can you tell us about the role ADDA played for the greater economy during the COVID-19 pandemic?
ADDA is leading the general transformation journey of the government of Abu Dhabi. Our role is to set the direction, do some central implementation, and provide the guidelines, policies, and procedures. At the same time, we help other government entities when required. ADDA has been the central entity in setting the foundation and guidelines and even leading many shared components like infrastructure, so that everyone can use unified platforms and infrastructure such as the payment platform Abu Dhabi Pay. When the pandemic occurred, we issued guidelines on how to deal with security and started raising awareness of security measures and procedures. We did not have to redevelop things because we already had the services online. In the past, each department had their own services on their website; however, now the leadership wants all services made available on one portal to make it more convenient for customers. Today, we have around 260 services from different departments on our mobile app, which is not available on any other government application worldwide as far as we know. By the end of 2020, we hope to reach 100% with over 800 services. The journey is never ending, and we will continuously be in a cycle of improvement.
How does your R&D procedure work? What are the projections when it comes to e-government for the next three years?
The demand for digital is moving so rapidly that if you do not conduct research and remain up to date, others will pass you by, and you will get outdated quickly. We look at what other countries do, whether it be from private or industry, and from that we formulate the best way forward. There is a great deal of new technology emerging, as well as technology that came and left without anyone utilizing it. It is part of the institutional concept to remain up to date, and we usually do an annual review of our strategy and augment our learnings into that. By 2021, we will reach an advanced stage of providing services that no other country has done. It will have its own challenges, but we will overcome them. The subsequent period will focus on data, whether it is using analytically or integrating it with AI and machine learning. We will try to use data to help chronic problems and share data with the private sector so they can also use it internally. We say data is the new oil, and it is becoming fun to play with the data. We can use it, make sense of it, and use it to make decisions, tackle problems, and, most importantly, speed up economic development.