Smart cities key to Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation

Smart cities are nothing new. In fact, as far back as 1994 Amsterdam earned the title of the first smart city when they created a space that encouraged and enabled public internet use. Before this, the internet was reserved for an elite few but this digital city – called De Digital Stad (DDS) – allowed anyone with a modem to ‘dial in’ and explore the internet for the first time.

Today, almost 30 years later, the definition of what makes a city ‘smart’ extends well beyond internet connectivity. Currently, smart cities use a range of connected solutions and technologies to boost planning and operations, to improve service delivery and to add value to people’s lives. Think enhanced mobility driven by smart transportation networks, streamlined social services enabled by data analytics and automation and better engagement between governments and the public via instant digital communication channels.

And going forward, as the digital world and physical worlds become even more intertwined, these technology-enabled urban spaces are only set to get smarter.

Introducing the cities of the future

According to recent analysis from Frost & Sullivan, the smart city market is set to reach over $2.46 trillion by 2025. And the Kingdom is capitalising on the trend by leveraging smart cities as a major economic engine.

Smart city initiatives like OXAGON and The Line, both located within the NEOM development, closely align with the Vision2030 strategy for Saudi Arabia, which seeks to develop a high-tech knowledge economy that is less reliant on income from oil exports. These cities enable sustainable digital transformation across all sectors of society by focusing on “humanising technology” in an effort to improve and augment the citizen experience.

This creates incredible opportunities for businesses. For example, the smart cities of the future are built around automation. Saudi Arabia has the potential to double its economy – reaching $1.6 trillion – by 2030 if it fully adopts intelligent automation (a combination of RPA and AI) across all sectors, a report by professional services firm Ernst and Young has revealed. Delivering this smart automation requires a strong, scalable and efficient business infrastructure built on cloud technology and enabled through strategic private and public partnerships.

Partnering for digital transformation success

Enabling this level of innovation is only possible with the right infrastructure – physical, digital, energy and telecoms – and with the right partners in place. The private sector’s role in enabling smart cities has moved beyond providing the technology needed to make these spaces ‘smart’. Today, the private sector plays a more outcome-driven role; ensuring that residents have better lives, that businesses thrive and that governments achieve their goals of creating spaces that are more efficient, inclusive and sustainable.

Microsoft recently partnered with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Justice (MOJ) to upgrade its property transfer and archiving system. The MOJ was keen to move from manual, paper-based processes to a fully digitised system but the task was mammoth. To put the scale of the project in context, they needed to digitise almost 100 million documents going back hundreds of years. Microsoft made the entire process digital, transforming the MOJ into a fully digitised real estate repository and making it possible to complete a property transfer online in under an hour.

Work like this can easily be scaled to deliver similar levels of efficiency across different departments, ministries and even, an entire smart city. Our industry solution is designed specifically for government departments, delivering trusted and secure services that enable the kind of critical infrastructure needed to make even the most advanced smart cities a reality.

When I look at incredibly innovative and ambitious projects like OXAGON and The Line, I am confident that the Kingdom is on the right track to achieve the goals set out in Vision2030. I am also excited about the opportunities and possibilities that can be realised when the public sector and the private sector work together to turn data into insights so that it is possible to enhance citizen experiences, innovate city services and create cities that are more connected and advanced than we could ever have imagined.