Dr Ahmad Altarawneh is a civil engineer, a business data science professional, a quality and market strategy professional, DBA in Smart Responsive Cities, and has deep knowledge and expertise in CX, DX, EX and TX. He holds 32 International Certificates. Ahmad’s expertise is in areas of digital/business transformation, Metaverse, digital twin, conversational AI, Blockchain use cases and emerging technologies.
Q. A brief introduction of yourself highlighting your significant achievements
My name is Dr Ahmad Altarawneh. I am one of the senior consultants with Dubai police. My job focuses on transforming the organisation into the future, making it future-ready.
Q. How will Web3 affect governments worldwide and official transactions?
Everything progresses and Web3 is definitely coming to us like a running train, it’s basically part of the future that we need to be ready for and it’s going to take us into the future very fast. Web3 is going to play a big role in governments and organisations of all types and sizes and it’s going to involve everything that you can think of, from autonomous vehicles and drones, to monitoring and managing the safety and security of cities. So it is definitely going to affect governments in many ways, government entities that are going to quickly adopt anything that grows into Web3 are going to be winners, and they’re going to be the organisations that can create future readiness quickly, and that growth, of course, will require some essential elements. When I say adopt Web3, it’s first of all, the mindset of believing that Web3 is the future. The second thing is growing the people of the organisation into Web3, which means upscaling and upgrading people and knowledge within Web3 in many things because Web3 is definitely a very wide spectrum. It’s an ocean of things, so those government entities that are going to adopt and adapt to Web3 are going to be big winners. In many ways. They’re going to create efficiency, affectivity and they’re going to create future readiness. They’re going to do things faster, simpler, and better. They’re going to transform the organisation from anything periodic to everything real-time. Web3 will empower those organisations to do a lot of things, in services in particular.
Now, those government organisations that are not early adopters and believe in just waiting and seeing what will happen in Web3 and how it will develop and then trying to figure out what to do and what is the angle of Web3 that they can adopt and so on. Those are going to be government organisations that are probably going to lose out in the race for efficiency, as I said, affectivity, future readiness, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction and happiness.
How is it going to affect our government services and transactions? Well, it’s going to create better technologies, and it’s basically going to take us into a faster world where we can serve and deploy our services faster, better, more efficiently and more effectively, with a lot more governance. So that’s just a little bit about Web3.
Q. How do you see the Metaverse shaping up to become of mainstream value?
Some people think that the Metaverse is a game. I think it’s a game-changer.
What is it going to do to us? It is going to have tenfold and 20-fold the effect of what the internet did to us twenty-some years ago, so the Metaverse is definitely going to become a major part of our life, not tomorrow, but it’s definitely going to grow and grow a lot faster than what the internet did about 20 years ago.
So, in particular and in very simple words, the Metaverse is basically a word that means what comes after the world and it’s basically an application and a platform, it’s a concept, it’s a service, it’s a lot of things. It can be physical, it can be blockchain-based, it can be VR-based, and it can be a lot of things. The Metaverse is going to grow to not even need a headset. You don’t have to put a headset to use the Metaverse. You can log into a Metaverse like you log into a website or an application. The Metaverse is going to be in everything and all the verticals. It’s going to be services. It’s going to be in trading. It’s going to be in real estate. It’s going to be in university. It’s going to be in education. It’s going to be in health. It is already in a lot of these places. So Metaverse is definitely going to be a game-changer. It will produce a lot of value and impact for organisations. Again, there will be those who are early adopters, and there will be organisations that lag and wait. Because basically, it’s a decentralized model and concept, ownership of these things is still something that’s not there. Policing the Metaverse is basically like one of the things that we’re looking at in Dubai police. I suppose worldwide rules and regulations are still lagging and lacking when it comes to the Metaverse, but what is it going to do to us? It’s definitely going to be mainstream and it’s going to change our lives and it’s going to be a game changer, not just a game.
What are some of the real-life use cases for emerging disruptive technologies?
For example, if you take bundling the Metaverse with digital twin and conversational AI, so there you could produce a platform that you can deliver services anytime from anywhere in the world with any language because you have conversational AI, you can train the AI models to speak in any language and to execute services, deliver services in real-time, proactively, immersively and so on. So, this is basically one major use case, one of the things that we’re working at, again in Dubai police. So there in the Metaverse, for example, we can deliver our services and we could do it immersively. We can do it in any language and we can also do it anytime from anywhere. Anyone from anywhere around the world in any language can come in and talk to our chatbots. We call them digital twins.
And the beauty of it is you can choose to speak to a male or a female digital twin, dressed in, for example, the traditional Arab dress or the official police uniform. The beauty of it is also it can be 100% governed, you could see your services and we would be able to know or sort of like scale the customer journey into what we call the customer life journey. Now that’s pretty major. That’s a one-use case that can be done. So disruptive technologies are many. However, that would be one bundle.
And when it comes to disruptive services, I would always speak of bundles. It’s not just one service that can really produce magic. It would have to be a bundle of services.
Can you elaborate on the concept of digital twins?
If I wanted to elaborate more on the digital twin concept, so the digital twin will be one of the disruptive services, but it has many applications. We could use it, for example, in project management so we can create a digital twin of the project before we even execute the project, this is pre-project work so we can do a digital twin, and in that digital twin, we can simulate the project, we can simulate project risks, we can simulate project health and all kinds of things can happen, and then we can decide extremely well if this project should go forward or not. Once the project goes forward, then we could use the digital twin with a combination of wearables for example, for the people who are executing the project, the project team, labour, and so on, we could actually measure the project’s health and monitor the project and do all kinds of things that are magical about the project in real-time and remotely. So that’s another example on the digital twin, and also, the digital twin can be used in logistics it can be used in maintenance. For example, if an organisation wants to go from preventive maintenance to proactive maintenance, a digital twin will definitely work well here, and so this is where you could do a digital twin of the whole organisation and basically use that digital twin to simulate the whole organisation even if you want to move one person from one position to another position you could simulate it within the digital twin. These things would require AI so AI is developing and it’s developing very fast.
With AI developing very fast, is conversational AI taking the lead in the race?
Conversational AI could take the lead in the race that we’re actually competing in. Humans are always looking for ways to reduce effort. So basically, when you take the combination, for example, a Metaverse platform and a digital twin and then bundle them together and try to use them whether it’s in project management, whether it’s in training, whether it’s in logistics, maintenance, construction or whatever, there’s always the input side of things. How do you input data, where do you make these things read from and write to, and so on in terms of data. So, when this is conversational, imagine that I can speak to the digital twin in any language anytime from any wearable device from my phone, whatever it is, and input into the digital twin or the Metaverse platform using the concept of conversational AI, you can see now how things become low effort and low effort means efficiency means affectivity and definitely means innovating faster, doing work faster, producing project value and impact over the overall organisation a lot faster with conversational AI. There are challenges of course, there are pros and cons.
What are the pros and cons of government digital transformation?
Pros are simple, like ease of use, low effort, and breaking down barriers, such as language, geography, and time barriers can be broken with conversational AI or even the bundle of things such as the Metaverse digital twin, conversational AI, the connected concept, all of these things can be pros, which is breaking down barriers.
This is part of what governments are doing, which is digital transformation. So, now, if this is not a part of a strategy and an action plan, that is clear, then we have a problem. If an organisation just goes after digitally transforming, and here they believe that digital transformation is just putting on more automation, buying more systems or adopting more platforms and this as a service and that as a service and this as a platform, this is not the way to do it. What you need to do as an organisation is actually build a very solid, realistic, practical pragmatic strategy in digital transformation, and it actually needs to be two parts. There’s the digital side and the business side. So basically, you need to look at the business value you want to create. You need to look at the impact that you want to create within an organisation. I call this the benefit realization matrix. You need to come up with a benefit realization matrix in terms of your transformation, so you say, I want to lower customer efforts in my services. I want to make my services lower effort, we call that customer effort and it is an initiative or a project.
You look at the combination. What do I need to succeed in creating this impact, this value, this benefit? So here, you need to look in the main rooms. You need to look in the room of people, in the room of processes, in the room of technologies, resources and partnerships. And once you look in these three rooms, you decide what exactly needs to happen in each room so that you, with the bundle of all of these rooms working together, can create and put together the initiative or the project needed so that you can create that business value, which is lowering customer effort, lowering employee level effort, producing more quality of life, happiness, wellness, whatever it is that you want to achieve within an organisation. Mainly my recommendation here is one thing that we work on is based on what we call challenges and ambitions. So yes, we have a strategy, yes, we have KPIs, we have even OKRs (Objective Key Results). We have a lot of these things that we do strategically like any other organisation globally. However, we try to simplify things because, basically strategies are executed by people, and people are levels people are different levels of learning, different levels of capacities, different levels of capabilities and abilities and so on. It is people who execute strategies and what we do there is we try to reduce the strategy into a number of challenges and a number of ambitions and then give ownership of this ambition or this challenge to a group of people or cross-functional team that works on it and gets it done and achieved. That is one of the things that we do.
The pros in government digital transformation are if you have a strategy, if you have an action plan, if you have a framework for these things, then you can reduce things to a simple level where teams or cross-functional teams can execute achieving this ambition or beating this challenge. This is where you can best do your strategy.
Cons are basically if you go after a solution or a platform or something like that, if you haven’t done your research, if you haven’t done your work, if you haven’t done a benefit realization study, if you are not really clear about your ambitions and your challenges, you could easily pick up something, spend millions on it, and two months down the line, something else comes up.
Basically, you’ve shot yourself in the foot on this adoption. Other things is data. For example, digital transformation is an ecosystem. It’s a lot of things. And one of the major fuels that fuels digital transformation is data. You need to look within your organisation deeply at your data points, your data lakes and data sets, and things of that sort. If you don’t have enough people who can execute the analysis and visualization of data, then you have a problem. If your culture is not data-driven or data-enabled, you have a problem. If your data is not clean and, in many areas it needs cleansing and stuff like that, you have a problem. If your data is not enough then you need a data enrichment initiative that can enrich your data.
If your data is not shared, parts of it are not being opened all the time. If it’s not growing, then you have a problem. Those are all cons that can be associated with digital transformation. I’m just trying to be as simple as possible. The main objective should be working towards the bigger overall picture. If you remember many years ago, we started out with the term Electronic Governments, and then we grew from that concept of Electronic Governments into Smart Governments. Now we’re talking about the term Digital Governments which is actually growing. So, of course, digital governments, digital cities, digital organisations, smart cities, smart organisations, and so on. But what comes after that? If we consider Electronic Governments as iOS 10 and Smart Governments and Smart Organisations, Smart Cities, for example, as iOS 11 and 12, and Digital Cities, Digital Organisations, and Digital Governments as iOS 13, 14, 15 and 16 then what is iOS 17 or 18 or 19?
Can you explain the concept of ‘Responsive Cities’?
Well, the concept has grown across the world in small spots here and there. Thought leadership is all about that. It’s a concept that’s called responsive governments, responsive cities, and responsive organisations. The word responsive, if I want to explain it simply, it’s all about the interaction between the city and its users. Employees who work in the city, for example, in all kinds of organisations, public, private, semi-private, or whatever, are users of the city. People who live in the city are users of the city, people who bypass the city. If the city is between two cities, and you are coming from one city, driving through the city to another city, you’re a user of the city. If you do business or invest in the city, you are a user of the city.
City users become involved with the city in real-time, which means the city is managed officially, of course, by government entities and so on. But now, on the side of voice, it’s the voice of society, the voice of city users collectively. So it is the voice of the customer plus the voice of the employee, plus the voice of all city users, whether they’re investors or residents or whatever. All of them are actually improving the city, managing the city in as real-time as possible. And here, cities have to adopt this concept first, understand it, and then “capabalise” it. If I want to give my feedback to the city, then I need a platform or a channel to give this feedback.
So now we’re talking about real-time channels that enable city users to interact with the city, and that’s just part of the equation. The other part is where the city actually invests in the “Connected” concept and this is where everything in the city talks to everything in the city. So there is the V2V concept, for example, where a vehicle is talking to vehicles, and there is the V2X, where the vehicles are talking to the streets and lamps to better guide them and route them through the city and find parking and do all kinds of things. And there is the X2X, which is everything talks to everything. Here you need a lot of technologies such as Beacons, Geofencing, sensors, IoT, Web3, definitely 5G and so on. So this is basically where the city becomes responsive, which means if something is broken within the city, the city components already alert whoever needs to be alerted and it escalates that in an automated manner, in a digital manner, in as real-time as possible which is pretty much real-time. And it gets fixed, it gets corrected, it gets done. So “Crowd” concept here becomes really something that’s very valuable.
What are the major elements of establishing a “Responsive City”?
Well, let me reiterate that it’s the people, the city users, as this is a major element and a major component. It is the city investing in the city by doing whatever it takes into IoT and sensors and empowering these things. Then part of it is also regulations and laws that can allow that, like adopting cloud. For example, here in the Middle East and specifically in the Gulf Region, sometimes government organisations are not allowed to use the cloud. They need to be on either what we call sovereign cloud or private cloud and that sometimes limits us from reaching this concept of “Responsive City”. This is where all of these things have to work together, from regulations and people and organisations to governments and officials and culture, there’s awareness and there is marketing for the city that takes place and sensors, and it’s a collaborative effort. So I call it collaborative space cities. This is where the whole city collaborates with everything within the city so that they become responsible. What is the value of being a “Responsive City”? It is the quality of life. You create the highest levels of quality of life. You create people’s happiness, you reduce effort and you take out digital frictions. So there are a lot of values because I don’t believe in doing anything unless it is within a benefit realization somewhere.
What message do you have for our readers?
We are approaching a beautiful part of the world. It’s definitely challenging. Digital transformations come with a price. There’s a privacy issue. There are policing issues. There are law enforcement issues. There are what we call data privacy issues, ethics, AI ethics, and so on. City ethics, once we empower cities and make them responsive and, of course, to make them responsive, we have to deploy platforms and bring in a lot of platforms to talk to a lot of platforms, so we create what we call a read-write capability between all of these platforms, we have to become data-driven, data enabled. We have to collect a lot of data, a lot of behaviour analysis, a lot of attitude analysis on the side of city users and so on. So there are a lot of issues there that need to be looked at.
My message is adopt it, look at it, choose the level of adoption that is the best fit for your organisation, for you as a person, for you as an entity and grow from there. Scale upwards. Keep your eyes on lessons learned as you adopt and deploy and transform. Capture your lessons learned, learn from them and scale upwards. Sustain what you transform and make it grow. However, keep your eyes on the lessons learned. Learn from them so that when you transform the next time, the next segment of transformation will be less expensive for you, less heartbreaking, more efficient, and more effective. Thank you.
About Author
