The Growing Trend of City-Scale Digital Twins Around the World

A digital twin is a digital model of a physical asset. It collects information (via sensors, drones or other IoT and Industrial IoT tools) and applies advanced analytics, machine-learning and artificial intelligence in order to receive real-time insights about the physical asset’s performance, operation or profitability.

For Digital City Twins, hundreds of IoT systems and public databases are consolidated into a single portal creating a “digital twin” of the city. The simulation allows users to monitor construction progress, traffic, environmental conditions, public safety, energy consumption and building occupancy.

Such technology looks set to play an increasingly important role in the creation of smart cities around the world and in addressing major public health, safety, environmental and natural disaster issues. Bringing the virtual and physical worlds together in this way can help to better inform decision-making, reduces risk and also acts as a citizen engagement tool.

In the realm of smart cities, a digital twin is a virtual model of a city, a replica of the physical world. They are rapidly becoming indispensable tools to visualize the pulse of the city in real-time with layered data sources of buildings, urban infrastructure, utilities, businesses, movement of people and vehicles.

Rotterdam: Delivering Better City Operations

Rotterdam, Amsterdam has been developing and applying a variety of smart solutions to urban problems in recent years. A smart thermal grid is being constructed, for example, that will facilitate heat exchange between buildings and make entire neighbourhoods more energy efficient. Smart parking and intelligent (electric) mobility are supporting better traffic flow, and a range of other benefits are helping make life better for inhabitants.

Improving Citizen Living in France

Rennes Metropole in France has developed a digital 3D model covering the city’s entire territory. This online model is used in various ways, for urban mediation with citizens, and for urban development purposes such as sunshine simulation, noise modelling, tree shadow impact on buildings

Using the Digital Twin for Virtual Tourism

Helsinki using a Digital Twin as a testing tool open to the public, also for mitigating climate change and improving energy efficiency. But Helsinki is also using the digital twin to become leaders in Virtual Tourism. Virtual Helsinki is a digital experience that enables users to visit the city’s digital twin created in high-quality 3D. They will be able to visit all tourist attractions and this can be done at any time of the year, simply by using virtual reality glasses and an app.

Digital Twin to Help Provide World-Class Logistics

The city of Columbus, Ohio in the USA which won the US-wide Smart City Challenge in 2016. The Smart Columbus campaign aims to improve people’s quality of life, drive economic growth, provide better access to opportunities, become a world-class logistics leader, and foster sustainability by interconnecting infrastructure services, starting with transportation, housing, and healthcare, to model how new technologies work in a real city.

Singapore: The Most Advanced Digital Twin to Date

Singapore is widely recognised as one of the more advanced of the smart city digital twins. Virtual Singapore, project which was overseen by Dassault Systémes using its 3DEXPERIENCE platform is already well developed. The project offers four main capabilities to stakeholders: Virtual experimentation, test-bedding, decision-making and research & development.

Amaravati: A City Created from a Digital Twin

The first entire city within India, born with a digital twin is Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh. Amaravati is proposing a digital twin user ID scheme for every citizen that will serve as a single portal for all government information, notifications, forms and applications.

These are just a few cities solving their unique challenges and improving urban life through digital twinning and the trend seems to be that more and more cities will soon create their own digital twins. Portland in the US has a Digital Twin activated by residents’ cellular data. Dubai in the Middle East is using a Digital Twin project focusing on user experience and Yingtan in China has its’ 5G Digital Twin.

A digital twin is an invaluable tool that is set to become a cornerstone of the 4th Industrial Revolution. The digital city brings together the physical and digital worlds through Internet of Things technologies but also ties in the social world by creating a platform for all stakeholders. Starting with the digital twin, cities can begin to develop a new range of applications that will optimise, enhance, and improve all aspects of urban life.

Enabling Singapore Hawkers to Go Digital with Food Delivery Platforms

The National Environment Agency (NEA) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) recently announced that the pilot will include Singapore’s food delivery platforms as well as a leading hawker Food Delivery platform. The pilot will include 400 stalls spread across 14 hawker centres, including ABC Brickworks Market & Food Centre, Adam Food Centre, Amoy Street Food Centre, Golden Mile Food Court, and Taman Jurong Market & Food Centre.

Under the model, the leading hawker Food Delivery platform — the common acquirer for hawkers — will use its existing relationships with hawker stalls to onboard them onto the other food delivery platforms, such as uploading their menus onto the platforms, said the platform’s chief executive officer and co-founder.

The Online Ordering Platform for Hawkers revealed the pilot initiatives. The workgroup was established in June to assist hawkers affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in understanding the benefits of going digital and in using online ordering and delivery services. Hawkers have had a “tough period,” according to the Minister of State for Communications and Information as well as National Development. “Our hawkers are not having an easy time. Very tough. And I think these measures are very timely in supporting our hawkers and continue to preserve and support our hawker culture,” he said.

He identified three “pain points”: the high cost of platform commissions, the lack of support, particularly for elderly and less tech-savvy hawkers, to go digital, and the uncertainty of consumer demand, particularly for hawkers selling low-priced items.

Consumers can continue to order through their preferred platforms under this model, however, all orders will be received either through a single device or by on-site hawker captains at each hawker centre to place and coordinate orders.

Furthermore, the leading hawker Food Delivery platform will manage transactions and payments to hawkers, with same-day payments and no hawker commissions.

According to NEA and IMDA, since the June rollout of the latest Online Ordering for Hawkers, 5,500 hawkers across 113 hawker centres managed by NEA and its appointed managing agents have been engrossed by digital ambassadors from the SG Digital Office on how to supplement physical transactions with digital ones.

NEA’S DIGITAL SUPPORT FOR HAWKERS GROUP

By the end of the year, the NEA will have developed a set of best practises that will be compiled into a step-by-step Digital Support Guide for Hawkers.

One suggestion is to form a Digital Support for Hawkers group at each hawker centre. This group will offer assistance to less digitally savvy hawkers who want to improve their online presence.

This includes creating a social media page for each hawker centre, facilitating community group purchases through the social media page, and coordinating with organisations to place bulk meal orders. According to NEA and IMDA, the group will be made up of “passionate individuals from the community or hawkers.”

All whilst, a digital “hawker champion” in the group should be willing to lead the group in assisting hawkers in developing and maintaining a digital presence on social media, subscribing to online ordering services, and adopting e-payment tools.

To coordinate and launch the initiative, a Singapore Digital Office digital ambassador will be assigned to each hawker centre.

The proportion of NEA-managed hawker stalls on online ordering platforms has also increased from 34% at the start of the campaign in June to 47% today. This includes 660 hawker stalls that have signed up for the first time, according to the statement.

In Singapore, approximately 3.3 million people shop in the e-commerce market, with projected revenue of USD $2,793 million in 2021. Between 2021 and 2025, revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.9%. Such expansion should result in a market volume of USD $4,079 million by 2025.

Developing Persuasive Social Robots

In the future, socially interactive robots could help seniors age in place or assist residents of long-term care facilities with their activities of daily living. However, people may not actually accept advice or instructions from a robot. A new study from the University of Toronto Engineering suggests that the answer hinges on how that robot behaves.

“When robots present themselves as human-like social agents, we tend to play along with that sense of humanity and treat them much like we would a person.”

– Lead Author

Simple tasks of persuasion, like asking someone to take their medication, have a lot of social depth to them. When putting robots in those situations, the researchers need to better understand the psychology of robot-human interactions. Even in the human world, persuasion is complex and has multiple variables. But one key concept is authority, which can be further divided into two types: formal authority and real authority.

Formal authority comes from roles, such as teachers, parents and bosses have a certain amount of formal authority. The real authority has to do with the control of decisions, often for entities such as financial rewards or punishments.

To simulate the concepts, the researchers set up an experiment where a humanoid robot was used to help 32 volunteer test subjects complete a series of simple tasks, such as memorising and recalling items in a sequence.

For some participants, the robot was presented as a formal authority figure: it was the experimenter and the only ‘person’ the subjects interacted with. For others, the lead researcher was presented as the experimenter, and the robot was introduced to help the subjects complete the tasks.

Each participant ran through a set of three tasks twice: once where the robot offered financial rewards for correct answers to simulate positive real authority, another time, offering financial penalties for incorrect answers, simulating negative real authority.

Generally, the robot was less persuasive when it was presented as an authority figure than when it was presented as a peer helper. This result might stem from a question of legitimacy. Social robots are not commonplace today, people lack both relationships and a sense of shared identity with robots. It might be hard for people to see robots as a legitimate authority.

Another possibility is that people might disobey an authoritative robot because they feel threatened by it. The aversion to being persuaded by a robot acting authoritatively seemed to be particularly strong among male participants, who have been shown in previous studies to be more defiant to authority figures than females, and who may perceive an authoritative robot as a threat to their status or autonomy.

A robot’s social behaviours are critical to acceptance, use and trust in this type of distributive technology, by society as a whole. This ground-breaking research provides an understanding of how persuasive robots should be developed and deployed in everyday life, and how they should behave to help different demographics, including our vulnerable populations such as older adults.

The big takeaway for designers of social robots is to position them as collaborative and peer-oriented, rather than dominant and authoritative. The research suggests that robots face additional barriers to successful persuasion than the ones that humans face. If robots are to take on these new roles in society, their designers will have to be mindful of that and find ways to create positive experiences through their behaviour.

U.S. researchers have been developing robots to help humans in various fields, including creating modern robotic white cane for the visually impaired community. As reported by OpenGov Asia, equipped with a colour 3D camera, an inertial measurement sensor, and its own onboard computer, a newly improved robotic cane could offer blind and visually impaired users a new way to navigate indoors.

India to Officially Roll Out National Digital Health Mission

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will roll out the National Digital Health Mission on 27 September. It seeks to bridge the existing gap among different stakeholders in India’s healthcare ecosystem through digital highways.

Under the Mission, citizens will be provided with a unique digital health ID, which will contain all the health records of the person. The National Health Authority (NHA) is the government body tasked to implement the programme based on the guiding principles laid out in the National Digital Health Blueprint.

The Mission was first piloted last year in August across six union territories. As per a news report, the six union territories were Puducherry, Chandigarh, Ladakh, Lakshadweep, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Daman, Diu, Dadra, and Nagar Haveli.

The Prime Minister, during his Independence Day speech last year, had announced that “a new campaign” would begin called the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM). The objectives of the Mission are the secure processing of individual data and easy accessibility of digitalised personal and medical records by individuals and health service providers. The recent initiative will give Indian citizens a Health ID card. Every doctor or a pharmacy visit will be logged on the card; from the doctor’s appointment to the medication, everything will be available in the health profile, the Prime Minister stated.

According to the Indian Health Minister, the mission is on track and the three basic platforms, health ID, doctor’s registry called Digi-doctor and the health facility registry have been made operational. The health ID card includes details like Aadhar and mobile numbers.

The Health Minister also released Post-COVID Sequelae Modules, aimed at the capacity-building of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and community healthcare workers across India, to deal with the long-term effects of COVID-19. The modules have been prepared to provide guidance to doctors and healthcare workers to deal with the issue of the long-term effects of COVID-19, the minister noted. He added that the proactive and comprehensive treatment of COVID-19 is required to ensure minimum side effects.

The government has been developing and deploying emerging technologies in the healthcare industry. In May, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IIT-Madras) developed ‘BlockTrack’, a blockchain-based secure medical data and information exchange system for a mobile phone-based application. The application, which is the first of its kind, is currently being field-tested at the institute’s hospital.

BlockTrack aims to securely digitise healthcare information systems while ensuring the protection of sensitive personal information and medical records. It does this by decentralising the control and ownership of patient data, through a blockchain-based innovation. The BlockTrack innovation is now protected through a provisional IP filed with the Indian Patent Office, as OpenGov Asia had reported.

The Android version has been developed separately for patients and doctors. It opens up universal and transferable healthcare information management and emphasises data privacy and tracking the spread of infectious diseases across geographies. It allows the interoperability of systems from multiple hospitals, institutes, and healthcare organisations. The patient can choose to visit any healthcare facility on BlockTrack’s blockchain network without any concerns about duplication of records or re-registrations. This is one of the first implementations of blockchain technology for securing healthcare data management systems. The approach is expected to make an impact in securely digitising and maintaining unique patient records across the country and eventually across the world.

Chinese Researchers Make Breakthrough in Quantum Technology

Chinese researchers have made a crucial breakthrough in quantum communication technology, boosting the future development of secure satellite-based long-distance and global quantum communication networks. The research team constructed a 15-user Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) network. The network enabled the direct transmission of confidential information among the users connected by the network for the first time.

Quantum communication is a cutting-edge information technology that promises ultra-secure transmission of data. Scientists have developed many models for such transmission, including quantum key distribution, quantum teleportation and QSDC.

Based on QKD technology, many different types of quantum communication networks have been proposed. However, such communication networks only transmit the key but do not directly transmit information.

In contrast, QSDC sends secret information directly over a secure quantum channel. Any attack of QSDC results in only a random number, and cannot obtain any useful information from it. Therefore, QSDC has simple communication steps and reduces potential security loopholes, and offers higher security guarantees.

In recent years, the experimental QSDC has been developed significantly. However, the inability to simultaneously distinguish the four sets of encoded orthogonal entangled states in entanglement-based QSDC protocols limits its practical application. Experimental demonstration of QSDC is required. To achieve wide applications of QSDC, they constructed the fully connected entanglement-based QSDC network, including five subnets, with 15 users. The result demonstrates the feasibility of a proposed QSDC network.

China included quantum technology as one of the new high techs in its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025). China’s five-year plan (FYP) is one of the most important policy blueprints that set medium-term goals for the country’s economic and social development. Developing self-reliant technologies is expected to be one of the top priorities in its 14th FYP.

The President of China has stressed the importance and urgency of advancing the development of quantum science and technology. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory that has been used successfully in explaining microscopic phenomena in all branches of physics. Experts believe the whole world is on the brink of a quantum revolution.

China has made breakthroughs in some of the key areas, but still faces multiple challenges. He stressed the need to develop self-reliant technology in order to secure a stable supply chain. More support should be given to the industry in areas including development policy, talent recruiting, academic environment and so on.

Just as 5G promises to revolutionise digital communications and by doing so, spark the creation of breakthrough products and services such as driverless cars and telemedicine, quantum computing offers advances of a similar magnitude.

By integrating information technology with quantum mechanics, quantum computers deliver many thousands of times the computing power of conventional or classical computers. They do this by harnessing the three principles of quantum mechanics: superposition, entanglement and interference.

As reported by OpenGov Asia, China developed a miniaturised quantum satellite ground station. The ground station is light and portable and can be installed within 12 hours, allowing users in remote areas to use quantum communication conveniently. The piece of quantum key distribution equipment is about the same size as a laptop, which can greatly reduce the cost of quantum network building and maintenance.

In recent years, China has achieved a series of breakthroughs in quantum technology, including the world’s first quantum satellite, a 2,000-km quantum communication line between Beijing and Shanghai, and the world’s first optical quantum computing machine prototype.

A global quantum network can be realised by connecting more national quantum networks from different countries via ground connections or ground-to-satellite links. In the future, quantum communication will be applied in the fields of finance, political affairs and national defence. A whole industry chain and eventually a truly secure quantum internet will be possible.

Digital Transformation of Vietnam National Museum of History

The Vietnamese National Museum of History has introduced several new virtual shows to attract visitors, maintaining social distancing protocols amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the museum’s director, it has applied digital technology in preserving and promoting cultural heritage for many years. It had intended to build a digital database for Vietnamese cultural heritage (E-Heritage) and has obtained positive results.

As per a news report, one of the latest shows is a 3D virtual interactive display of national treasures, which the museum developed in collaboration with a private tech player. Additionally, the National Museum of History Volunteer Club has researched and built an online tour of the museum to meet the needs of visitors during the new normal. The online tour, held on 12 September, was a combination of narration with various digital technologies that helped bring new perspectives and experiences. It attracted nearly 100 participants.

In particular, the museum’s History Classroom programme and the History Lover’s Club are being gradually converted to an online form, via the Zoom application. Till now, the museum has organised hundreds of free history classes for more than 5,000 students, including Vietnamese children living abroad. Based on the experience and success of these programmes, the director affirmed that in the coming time, the museum will continue to design more shows using digital technology to meet the growing demand of the public.

Earlier this month, OpenGov Asia reported that Vietnam will need to do more if it wants to become a digital powerhouse as envisioned in the socio-economic development strategy adopted by the Party in February 2021. A biannual update on Vietnam’s economic performance showed that the country needs to ensure the development of a digitally skilled labour force, the emergence of a dynamic and agile local private sector, and good but secure access to information.

Vietnam aims to be among the top 50 countries in the ICT Development Index as early as 2025, and its digital economy is hoped to account for one-third of the country’s GDP by the end of the decade, instead of only 5%. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the country has witnessed a great change in the application of new digitisation tools in both the private and public sectors. It is estimated that in June 2021, about two-thirds of private enterprises in Vietnam had access to technologies related to the digital economy. This is a huge leap from the pre-COVID-19 period.

However, Vietnam still has a lot of work to do. In addition to upgrading infrastructure, the country needs to encourage the application of digital technology and attract investment to create conditions for small businesses to participate in the digital economy. Vietnam also needs to upgrade digital technology infrastructures and equip workers with digital skills to help them become more dynamic in adapting to new technologies. In the short term, Vietnam can take advantage of the presence of many famous technology enterprises to learn and improve digital skills for local labourers working for these corporations. The government must issue a series of initiatives to attract talents from expatriates working in digital technology fields around the world.

EXCLUSIVE: OpenGovLive! Virtual Breakfast Insight: Powering up Digital Transformation for Malaysian Public Sector

The digital economy grew rapidly in 2020, as the pandemic drove businesses to ramp up their online offerings. Similarly, the “new normal is forcing the public sector to speed up digital transformation initiatives to ensure that citizens continue to have mission-critical services uninterruptedly and seamlessly.

Governments and agencies around the world are implementing a slew of digital transformation strategies to enhance citizen satisfaction and experience as well as to cut costs. These initiatives have been accelerated by the pandemic and, in some cases, it has helped clean up systems. While the pandemic has revealed flaws, it has also created opportunities to strategise and strengthen economic, societal and infrastructure resilience, effectiveness, and responsiveness.

The public sector is currently focusing on improving service delivery by deploying digital technologies to broaden its scope and quality. This includes improving e-government portals to become more efficient through monitoring and progress analysis.

The adoption of cloud technologies has seen a significant uptake, as it plays a critical role in enabling the rapid transition to remote working and scaling up services to meet surging demand.

Like other countries, Malaysia is also still facing significant challenges as a result of the crisis. It has impacted Malaysians of all ethnicities and social classes, as well as both the public and private sectors. Entire industries have been disrupted and many day-to-day interactions are now virtual.

The Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint has been developed to set the direction, outline the strategies, initiatives and targets to drive the growth of the digital economy, including bridging the digital divide. By capitalising on existing opportunities, the Blueprint will ensure that the country is ready to embrace digital technology and realise the aspirations of MyDIGITAL.

It has compelled the public sector to optimise IT architecture and processes, as well as hastened the adoption of cloud technologies, managing technological risks and scaling up government services to the uptick in demand.

The government now collects performance data regularly that can provide insights to be used for future planning and decision-making. This will result in a forward-thinking public sector that uses relevant citizen data to move toward more proactive and, possibly, predictive service delivery.

It is evident that a successful Digital Transformation programme will improve transparency, accuracy, and accountability, ensuring Malaysian citizens benefit from an improved democratic process.

This was the focal point of the OpenGovLive! Virtual Breakfast Insight on 23rd September 2021 – a closed-door, invitation-only, interactive session with Malaysia’s top government agencies. The session is focused on imparting the current advancements and measurements in the Public Sector’s digital transformation journey towards efficiency.

Citizen-centric solutions for future-ready government

Mohit Sagar: Citizen demand is growing by the day and Governments are becoming more agile

Mohit Sagar, Group Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, OpenGov Asia, kicked off the session with his opening address.

During the pandemic, he acknowledges, the demand for online services skyrocketed. As a result, many businesses offered a plethora of personalised options which has made customers more discerning and demanding. According to Mohit, the rate of this acceleration is driven and underpinned by technological advancements. Certain platforms empower organisations significantly – which is ultimately what organisations and governments seek.

In addition to digital offerings, there has been a paradigm shift in the way people think about and adopt any technology. Moreover, there has been a radical change in the culture after the pandemic. The approach to new platforms, new solutions and new applications are far different from the pre-pandemic era. People, organisations and governments see the need for and are willing to take the risk to adopt new ways of doing things online, digitally and remotely.

The main challenge for governments as they endeavour to meet the changed demands of citizens is juggling many things at once – infrastructure, processes, security and upskilling. With the amazing job that retail and banking have done compounded with the ubiquity of smart devices and the transition to becoming digital-natives, citizens are far more tech-savvy. Every household in every country now uses technology in their daily lives and data plays a critical role in this digital landscape.

Citizen requirements are evolving – they demand more, faster and easier services – and are growing by the day. To manage these expectations and meet the demands, governments need to become more tech-dependent and agile; but there is much opposition to change.

This resistance can be overcome if organisations collaborate intentionally and proactively. Planning a digital strategy involves engaging and collaborating with multiple stakeholders. This requires not only time and technology but expertise.

Mohit believes that finding the right partner is critical to success. Working with experts frees agencies to concentrate on their core mandates and deliverables.

The new normal needs a new way of thinking

Eric Quah: What can citizens expect from the government?

Eric Quah, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia, in his opening address emphasised how digital transformation, driven by COVID-19, has irreversibly changed people’s lives and daily activities.

He emphasised the importance of being a citizen and the responsibilities that go with being one. People need to have clear and realistic expectations of transformational change from the government. There must be an accurate and reasonable understanding of what a government can and should do in the light of what is essential and required to thrive in the current scenario.

Eric thanked Mohit for hosting the event and expressed the hope that it would provide knowledgeable and informative insights on advancing the digital transformation milestones.

My Digital Government for the Future – The Open-Source Way

Danielle Lee: The right common platform is an important foundation to build digital services on

Danielle Lee, Transformation Specialist, APAC Transformation Office, Red Hat acknowledged how everything had changed overnight when COVID-19 hit the world in late 2019. In the months that followed, practices, platforms and processes that were put in place – for the most part reactively and ad-hoc – have become the SOP for the “new norm”.

The pandemic, in her opinion, has put tremendous pressure on organisations to shift to digital and this new norm is required to operate with speed, scalability and stability. A few services have emerged as the new digital norm stand out in terms of transformation.

For instance, the Open API system has changed the way institutions think about technology and security. Organisations to interact digitally through the integrated and seamless Customer Experience methods. These have now become essential and are no longer merely ‘good to have’ – they are a top objective and expectation needed to provide a frictionless experience for end-users.

Currently, everything is online or via mobile and there is renewed pressure to transform how Malaysians interacts with the government.

Danielle agreed with Eric’s statement that agencies and organisations can play a role in leveraging data that they already have on citizens to interact, engage and communicate with greater speed and improved experiences using analytics.

From her experience and lessons learnt while creating a digital bank and other digital initiatives, she shared a few Key Differentiating Technology Capabilities that are necessary for digital leaders.

At the top are platform scalability, where modern, cloud-native systems can be scaled to meet growing customer demand, partner integration requirements and data processing needs while maintaining a cost advantage.

There are substantial difficulties when integrating legacy systems, especially where the legacy integration layers were not ready to be scaled and could not use cloud because bare-metal servers were used at the time. Those challenges, however, had taught the agency to be future-ready when implementing a cloud strategy.

In these scenarios, the importance of a scalable cloud-native container platform, such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, running on top of hybrid cloud infrastructure is easily seen. The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a dependable hybrid cloud foundation for developing and scaling containerised applications. The platform provides a single pane of glass for managing workloads across servers in an agnostically.

“Having a right common platform right across multiple platforms, Danielle says,” I think that is kind of important foundation for us as an organisation to build our digital service.”

The advanced data analytics engine includes AI and ML capabilities to improve a personalised customer experience and also efficiency gains through processing services automation is the next pillar on the Key Differentiating Technology Capabilities.

Agile integration plays a role in these three capabilities. “The truth is that data integration, as Mohit mentioned earlier, is coming from all over the place,” Danielle said. This is where an open architecture platform that enables hybrid integration across application services both internally and externally can support rapid external growth such as through partnerships.

In closing, Danielle said that although technology is important, culture also needs to be reflected equally.

Enjoy transformation with continuous innovation and collaboration

David Graham: Continue and enjoy this transformation journey.

David Graham, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Carlsbad, the next speaker, has been working with the government and private sector for the past 20 years.

There is a lot to be said for the question posed by previous speakers, “How do you know when to bring technology and lessons learnt during the pandemic to truly make things better for the people or citizens we serve?”

To deal with that, David first shared a little about the country he works with. There are 18 cities in a county in the San Diego region, and Carlsbad has a population of about 1.4 million people; however, small and large cities alike are focused on how they can use data and technology to improve the lives of their residents.

San Diego is well known for its work on IoT and for its innovative companies that are part of the city’s innovation ecosystem – which has led to the county’s transformation journey. For example, the region has the world’s first all-electric car fleet and the largest deployment of smart streetlights and is consistently addressing climate change from all fronts. Adoption of technology in the county is high and the appetite for more keeps growing.

Carlsbad explored the development of digital tools for citizens and the insights were provided by the citizens or residents themselves – assisting the government to drive change using those insights.

David elaborated on a strategy they call “Connected Carlsbad” that is built on 5 pillars:

Pursue community-wide digital transformation
Build capacity for Data-driven Decision making
Foster a vibrant civic engagement culture
Enhance accessibility and transparency
Promote safety and sustainability through connectivity

Ultimately, Carlsbad is still looking for its “moon-shot.” Some of the greatest things that have happened in the world today have occurred as a result of problems and challenges, but they have been done collectively, and that is the type of moon-shot that Carlsbad is looking for.

“One might wonder what there is to learn if we are already there?” David ponders. “Now that innovation has advanced, what do organisations do on their transformation journey?

He answerers that with a quote from Mark Zuckerberg – move fast and break things – and then exhorts the delegates, “Now you do good, and you can also break things.”

One way to assess how an organisation or country is doing is a digital maturity model that has levels of where organisations is that ranges from digital novice to best in class. Several factors contribute to the success of a digital transformation strategy and creativity. Skills, resources, infrastructure; even culture can be either an accelerant or a detriment to innovation.

Organisations, he believes, should put all of their learning in the context of what they are trying to achieve, taking an inclusive approach to development or innovation that is being implemented. It should not only be collaborative but have a greater level of inclusivity, equity, understanding and empathy.

David stresses that the common thread when governments and organisations have been successful is when they have put people first. “All of this collaboration and connection, followed by shared understanding and information, are really some of the best ways for us to be able to drive change in our organisation and communities throughout our country.

David concluded by stating that there is no end to this digital transformation journey and that it is always a continuous effort that must be adopted each day. “It’s best”, he says, “to continue and enjoy this transformation journey.”

Interactive Discussion

After the informative presentations, delegates participated in interactive discussions facilitated by polling questions. This activity is designed to provide live-audience interaction, promote engagement, hear real-life experiences, and impart professional learning and development for participants.

The first question asked is what external help organisations think is needed most to accelerate their digital transformation journey. An overwhelming majority (80%) of the participants answered mindset change and new ways of working. The remaining fifth were equally divided between building the framework and a standard platform (10%) and agile integration (10%).

The next poll was on their biggest challenge in digitalisation. More than half (53%) went with common framework and platform. About a quarter (26%) said people and skillsets were a challenge while 11% opted for scalability. The remaining delegates were evenly split between answered long release cycles (5%) and stated change could result in incidences and outages (5%).

When asked what their success factors for digitalisation were, 38% indicated customer experience and another 38% opted for speed to deliver. Stability was chosen by 12%, 6% said scalability and the balance 6% has others.

Delegates were questioned about their organisation’s cloud strategy. More than (56%) answered hybrid cloud, 28% said private cloud, 11% went with all on-premises and 5% chose multi-cloud.

When queried on what the top challenges in leveraging data are between the organisations, half said they were unable to do so because of security constraints. Just under a third (31%) considered data integration the biggest challenge while 19% had other issues.

In sharing what the key value and driver of a government cloud is, 59% agreed it was security while 29% opted for standardisation and governance. The remainder were balanced between the total cost of ownership/price (6%) and integration (6%).

On what their plans were to develop new applications and to modernise their legacy applications, 44% said they would outsource, 33% would opt for SaaS, 17% would re-write while 6% confirmed they would retire.

The final question asked how they would characterise the current stage of digital transformation in their organisation. 42% said they were planning but no work implementation or execution had been done yet. A third (32%) indicated that an MVP / pilot project had been rolled out and a quarter (26%) said a full-scale implementation of more than one programme or project had been undertaken.

Conclusion

As more organisations and agencies accelerate their digital transformation efforts, challenges and difficulties are unavoidable. Continuing resource constraints necessitates increased legislative priority, budget constraints and the preservation of an existing system. To address these and other issues, it is clear that the future of government will be digital.

Citizens’ expectations are important in all of this, and governments all over the world are working hard to meet them. Innovative technology must be used to empower and improve government agencies’ business practices while also lowering costs and making the citizen experience as smooth and efficient as possible.

In closing, Eric Quah, Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia and Jovern Lim, Enterprise AE of Intel Corporation thanked the delegates for attending the event session. Eric praised the participants for providing useful information, “It is all about sharing one another’s thoughts to learn from the challenges and improve.”

He agreed that digital transformation was here to stay and that changes will inevitably occur. It is a radical shift that organisations should make a habit of. Red Hat is not only known for its open-source operating systems, but the company is always ready to help customers modernise their existing systems and build new infrastructure while adhering to budgets, following regulations and ensuring citizens have the best possible experience.