The Smart Dubai Department (Smart Dubai) implemented a full agenda of activities to mark UAE Innovation Month 2020, with its focus running from February 23-29 to correspond with the emirates engagement with the country-wide event. Smart Dubais initiatives activities Which includes the DubaiNow Hackathon, organising innovation themed workshops for all employees at the Smart Dubai offices, and taking part in the exhibition organised by The Executive Council of Dubai.

Her Excellency Dr Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr, Director General of the Smart Dubai Department, said: Our mission at Smart Dubai is to embrace advanced, promising technologies with more potential and embed them in services and initiatives tailored to make life less complicated for citizens, residents, and visitors in Dubai. We work to make Dubai the happiest and smartest city in the Earth.

Needless to say, when technology is your instrument of choice, innovation is of utmost importance, H.E. added. And with that in mind, Smart Dubai is constantly committed to promoting, embracing, and encouraging innovation. UAE Innovation Month provided an unparalleled chance to do just that, as it provided a distinguished platform for us to show off our present day breakthroughs, exchange expertise and knowledge with innovative people and organizations from throughout the world, and evaluate the growth weve made in enforcing the wise leaderships ambitious initiatives and visions.

The activities from Smart Dubai covered the DubaiNow Hackathon, where contestants sought to come up with innovative solutions to improve the overall architecture of the DubaiNow application. The software was designed to provide a single, centralised service platform with fast, seamless, and paperless services that enable Dubai residents to carry out their transactions and paperwork online and from the comfort of their smartphones. It performs an influential role in enforcing the Dubai Paperless Strategy, which strives to make the Dubai government the first administration in the world to forego paper for all government transactions.

Contestants have been split into 4 teams, each focusing on a specific area of improvement: Authentication, Performance, Ancillary Services and Realtime Monitoring. The overall target was to give an integrated experience for users, minimising and doing away with challenges, and making the product more user-friendly.

The Authentication teams list of goals covered seamless and unified authentication, as well as upgraded and enhanced integrations, while the Performance team sought to optimise business process management and streamline payment systems. The team specialising in Ancillary Services labored on traceability and logging, cache and OTP as a service and exception handling, while the Realtime Monitoring team centered on application availability, performance and operations analytics.

The challenge resulted in numerous improvements for the DubaiNow app, namely, shortening loading time when the app is launched and when accessing services; enhancing user experience and presenting them with data as soon as possible; setting up a performance monitoring system that also tracks how users react to the application and helps tackle problems they can also face; enhancing the payment system and informing users of the genuine reasons the payment process face any obstacles; and continuously monitoring services on the platform and informing the relevant entities in case of delays or problems with their respective services.

Another item on the agenda for Innovation Month were the workshops the Smart Dubai Department organised at its headquarters, in partnership with leading international research and advisory company, Gartner. The first session titled Seven Digital Disruptions You Might Not See Coming featured Daryl Plummer, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst, Chief of Research, and Chief Gartner Fellow, and brought together executives and officials from throughout the Dubai government. The department held another workshop for Data Champions, which introduced them to a number of approaches to use technology to make sure worker happiness.

Smart Dubai additionally organised two workshops for its employees, the first titled How To Be Innovative, which based on realising the function of innovation in the workplace, while the second, Styles at Work, centered on assisting participants better understand their behaviour and the behaviour of their colleagues via the use of a simple diagnostic tool.

Smart Dubais agenda for UAE Innovation Month 2020 included taking part in the exhibition organised by The Executive Council in Boulevard Hall Emirates Towers, where taking part entities show their ultra-modern innovations and accomplishments. The department showcased the modern additions to the DubaiNow application, with the platform having grown to house 111 services from 33 government entities throughout 12 sectors: security and justice, public transport, payments and bills, residency visas, mobility, health, business and employment, education, housing, and Islam, among others.

On a similar note, the Smart Dubai crew additionally took part in the exhibition organised by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) at Mirdiff City Centre, showcasing its UAEPASS service the national digital identity platform, launched in October 2018 in partnership with the TRA and the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority (ADDA). It also participated in the UAE Hackathon, which had the theme this year Data for Happiness and Well-being.'

UAE Innovation Month is one of the biggest innovation festivals in the world and is a national effort that brings together government entities, private companies, and individuals to establish a culture of innovation in the UAE. Following the success of UAE Innovation Week 2015 and 2016, UAE Innovation Month was announced to celebrate innovation throughout the nation. The month-long festival targets to give a boost to the UAEs role as a global hub for innovation, promote the development of innovative ideas, establish a significant culture of innovation, and support the UAE National Innovation Strategy.