Digital public service infrastructure is the root of smart city offerings. It is essential to enabling public sector digitalisation, from local government services all the way through to central government. This digitalisation journey is ongoing for all organisations at all levels of government, and incremental improvements can always be made, taking the narrative from simple computerisation of processes, to what we’re seeing increasingly in cities today in the roll-out of artificial intelligence-enabled services.
Digital transformation in the public sector requires not just the adoption of digital technology, but the overhaul of organisational vision, governance, and process, extending into the need for collaboration between different sectors. In this way, digital transformation can support cities and governments in creating new types of products and services which not only benefit citizens, but also create valuable insights into operations to improve resource management, productivity, user experience, and even staff retention.
Digital transformation of public services can bring benefits in three significant areas: digital government, digital society, and digital economy. For example, a business person might want to open a restaurant – which is the end objective – but regulations require him to transact with numerous agencies to get the necessary permits. Public sector digital transformation can make this much more accessible; streamlining the process will ultimately drive the digital economy and increase the competitiveness of a country or city.
While this is broadly well understood by policy and decision-makers, this transformation cannot take place without the digital public service infrastructure to underpin it, and it is often neglected.
Understanding digital public sector infrastructure
This infrastructure is built around data, not just the technology and governance. Digital public sector infrastructure has two core components, which Huawei calls One Network and One Cloud. If data is the new crude oil, One Network is equivalent to the drill and pipeline – the drill being the different end devices that interact with people and machines, while the pipe refers to potentially three areas: the national or city authority’s backbone network; the metropolitan access network; or the campus network.
A major characteristic of the One Network is inclusive connectivity – which could range from fibre-optic to WiFi 7 – to enable digital society and drive digital government and the digital economy. There are different kinds of One Networks and a good example is the RuralStar, which is used in more than 60 countries to connect more than 15 million people. It is perfect for challenging terrain like deserts, mountainous regions, and rural valleys. The simplicity of the system means that a node can be built in less than seven days, cutting set-up costs and time by up to 70 per cent and its footprint is minimal – RuralStar consumes no more energy than five light bulbs.
One Cloud can be described as the oil refinery and the catalysts and additives in the crude oil analogy. The oil refinery is the data centre, data centre network, computing, storage, security and, importantly, the cloud stack that offers private or hybrid cloud services. As for catalyst and additives, these are the tools for DevSecOps (development, security and operations) – the data lake and even AI enablement.
Public sector digital transformation in action
There are many examples from around the world of how these technologies are being deployed to accelerate public sector digital transformation and in turn drive digital government, the digital society and digital economy.
The Spanish city of Alicante welcomes more than 8.5 million visitors a year, which puts a strain on public services. The government system had been in use for 10 years and was showing the strain because of insufficient network bandwidth, outdated equipment and failing to meet service requirements. Based on a software defined network and autonomous driving network management system, Huawei’s hyperconverged data centre network solutions are now helping the Alicante government offer secure, reliable, agile and efficient public services to help them accelerate their digital transformation.
Another example is the UAE. Emirates such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai both have great digital vision and strategy. Over the past two decades, the numerous digital initiatives have been welcomed by residents and visitors and have driven the adoption of information and communication technologies in all aspects of life.
Dubai, for example, has delivered more than 100 smart initiatives, and more than 1,000 smart services to the public by 20-plus government departments. Huawei has supported its need to deploy more data centres via our prefabricated modular design which helped Dubai build a data centre in less than a year.
It is increasingly important for the public sector to collaborate and exchange information to provide people-centric services. So we are also supporting Digital Nigeria through our partnership with Galaxy Backbone, which was set up under the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy in 2006 to provide the country’s digital infrastructure. It offers internet, data centre and cloud computing services to both the public and private sectors.
Galaxy is not only helping the federal government in saving money by allowing agencies to share connectivity and cloud computing, but also supporting digital society and digital economy by enabling the private sector and citizens, too. Huawei has been partnering with Galaxy since 2006 with fibre networking, data centre and cloud technologies.
Smart emergency management is another vital area of public sector digitalisation. Huawei has collaborated with a number partners in Kenya to provide a series of solutions, including incident reporting, computer-aided dispatch, teleconferencing and broadband critical communication. These solutions comprehensively improve collaboration capabilities and emergency response, as well as increase efficiency and safeguard people’s lives. Digitalisation has also enhanced economic development in Kenya.
The incident response time has been shortened from 30 minutes to eight minutes. In the year following the implementation, the crime rate in some regions decreased by 46 per cent and annual GDP increased by 5.8 per cent.
Breaking down digital transformation
Of course, one of the challenges with public sector digital transformation is that no two cities or countries are alike. Partners will often say “let’s replicate this success in another city” but it’s not that straightforward because of differences in areas such as governance and process. Having said that, Huawei’s many years of experience has enabled us to break down digital transformation success into eight common factors:
- Vision and leadership: digital transformation is not traditional business-as-usual computerisation and vision and leadership must guide the whole process.
- Governance and structure: robust governance and structure is required to ensure different agencies work together. An example of this is the creation of the Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence for nationwide cloud computing, data-sharing and AI enablement. If left to cities or national governments, many of them would not want to collaborate but rather run on their own data centre.
- Law and regulation: true digital transformation requires a redefinition of an organisation’s mission, governance and processes. With public service practices bound by laws and regulation, such transformation requires this redefinition otherwise some of the transformational projects may contravene the law and regulations.
- People and culture: many studies show that people and culture are the biggest barriers to digital transformation. The public sector needs to invest in people and usage of the technology not just the transformation implementation.
- Operating model: digital transformation is an ongoing journey and the public sector has to ensure a sustainable operating model whether traditional capital expenditure (CAPEX) or an operational expenditure (OPEX).
- Security and sovereignty: public sector organisations understand the importance of cybersecurity and upholding privacy in digital transformation but there can be a lack of focus on digital and data sovereignty. This is about ensuring full control of infrastructure and data. In the digital world, having something physical doesn’t mean you have control of it, which is why the term “sovereignty” is so important.
- Data strategy and public sector: organisations need to ask themselves a lot of questions in this area. What data do we need and where do we get it? What is the value of the data? How do we ensure data governance? Do I have the lawful access to the data? How do we promote data exchange? How do we ensure the quality of the data? And lastly, how do we process the data?
- Build a technology ecosystem: solutions like One Network and One Cloud are part of this, but there is another critical area of the ecosystem, which is solution partners. Huawei has more than 300 solution partners in the public sector globally.
There are also six critical steps that governments should follow through their development path to digital transformation, which are explaining in detail during the latest podcast between Huawei and SmartCitiesWorld.
Huawei is committed to helping governments around the world take a lead in developing their ICT infrastructure from designing and implementing the digital public service infrastructure with the One Network and One Cloud approach to working with solution partners. We have 10 labs that we have opened around the world, which our partners use to develop more than 1000 scenario-based solutions jointly with Huawei.
If successful we bring these solutions to other cities or even other neighbouring countries. In addition, we help cities and countries build their ICD talent ecosystem via our academies. Over the next five years, we will have 7,000 ICT academies around the world.
Public sector digital transformation is not just about the adoption of digital technology but also relies on having organisational vision, collaboration, robust governance, and having the right process, people and culture. If all of these elements are in place, though, it will succeed in bringing benefits in three areas of digital government, digital society and the digital economy and ultimately help to fulfil Huawei’s mission to create a fully connected world.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Hong-Eng Koh
Quelle/Source: Smart Cities World, 05.07.2023
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