While urbanisation continues its momentum in our region, our cities are under pressure to maintain a high level of livability and productivity.
A smart city is where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of its inhabitants and the city as a whole. Smart cities go beyond the use of just digital technologies, as they aim to create a better experience, stronger resilience, and enhanced sustainability.
In this episode of the Anticipate Podcast, Nizar Jegham, Digital Director, at WSP Middle East, is joined by Richard Dib, Chief Digital Officer at the Royal Commission of Al Ula. The talk uncovers the differences and similarities between two smart cities in the region in terms of their strategies, codes and guidelines.
Want to hear more insights from leading industry experts? Subscribe to our podcast via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud to stay up to date.
While urbanisation continues its momentum in our region, our cities are under pressure to maintain a high level of livability and productivity.
A smart city is where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of its inhabitants and the city as a whole. Smart cities go beyond the use of just digital technologies, as they aim to create a better experience, stronger resilience, and enhanced sustainability.
In this episode of the Anticipate Podcast, Nizar Jegham, Digital Director, at WSP Middle East, is joined by Richard Dib, Chief Digital Officer at the Royal Commission of Al Ula. The talk uncovers the differences and similarities between two smart cities in the region in terms of their strategies, codes and guidelines.
Want to hear more insights from leading industry experts? Subscribe to our podcast via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud to stay up to date.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
anticipate podcast, smart cities podcast, dubai podcast, smart cities, dubai, city, digital, projects, strategy, engineering firms, digital transformation, smart city advisor,
00:00
The GCC region is observing an unprecedent number of urban development projects of various types residential, mixed use touristic, etc. These range from cognitive cities such as neon to cultural and touristic destinations such as Ebola. What all these projects have in common is digital as a core pillar of their vision and mandate. Almost all these projects share the ambition to become smart cities in their own way. I am Nizar Jaida, Director of Digital Advisory Services of WSP Middle East. In this episode of The anticipate podcast, I am pleased to be joined by Richard Dieppe, Smart City advisor at the Royal Commission of AlUla. In this episode, we will learn more about AlUla Smart City strategy, ambition and journey so far. Hello Richard, welcome to the WSP anticipate podcast
00:58
Thank you Nizar Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be on W SP anticipate podcast
01:03
for the benefit of the audience. Can you share with us an overview of your journey within the smart city space in the region so far? As well as your current role within Allah Allah?
01:14
Okay, so my my journey within the smart city space started in 2014. I transitioned from the from the telecom sector, so I joined a boutique consultancy firm called an exam. I specialize in the smart city and my role back in 2014, was a smart city consultant. And I was helping smart Dubai to set up the initial strategy with its vision mission, its pillars and dimensions, and launched the first I would say the first digital initiative within smart Dubai, we call it the digital backbone of Dubai that will empower its digital transformation also known or rebranded as Dubai pulse. And in 2017, actually, I was asked by the director general of, of smart Dubai, Dr. Aisha Ben Bishop, to join internally her team, the smart Dubai team. And I joined as as the head of Dubai pulse, where I oversaw the implementation with the strategic partner because it was under a PPP agreement, handle the commercial relationship with the strategic partner and was responsible of developing what we call the commercial relationship between the other Dubai government entities and promote Dubai pulse portfolio and services. Over the years more data was flowing onto Dubai florals. And so my role evolved within smart Dubai and become more data focus and acquire the role of a data product director within smart Dubai. And I was responsible on building the data science team. It's an agile squad composed of several profiles, and not only data scientist, and finally in January 2022, I decided to join RCU, the Royal Commission for Allah Allah that is in charge of the development of Allah Allah. It's a county that is situated in the northwest of KSA, in the smart city department working to transform Olala county into a smart County.
03:15
Thank you, Richard. That's an impressive journey in this space, and maybe now zooming into Lola. So in order to provide the audience with some context, it is an area which is almost almost as big as Belgium in the northwest of the kingdom. It's rich with archaeological and heritage sites going back to the Bronze Age, and it's home, also to Hagar, Saudi Arabia first UNESCO site and all else is also home to a community of about 50,000 people and it is currently under development to become a sustainable touristic destination, aiming to attract around 2 million people by 2035 and bring another around 120 billion stars to the kingdom GDP. So given this context, can you tell us what was the Alola smartcity journey so far and how it is contributing or enabling the vision of the county
04:08
The smart city journey within RCU started late 2021. It was initiated by a mandate that was given by the RCU CEO Imran Madani, which resulted into the creation of a smart city department and since that moment, I've been heavily involved into setting what we call the smart city strategy in alignment of course with the 2030 vision but also with the RCU vision. A quick overview on the vision the OSU vision is our aim is to create an outdoor museum to diversify the local economy and to make the county more livable for citizen and seamless tourist experience. So RCU Smart City strategy is based on three main objectives. We call them the triple bottom line. So financial sustainability, environmental sustainability and enhance experience as you can see, it's there. They pull alignment with the with the vision whether 2030 and the RCU. One but also is it there is an alignment with the ITU more specifically with the ITU KPI then dimensions which are the economy environment and sociate the and culture. So, following the smart city strategy, what happened is, we needed some structure. So we organized ourselves into three main activities that is strategy and regulation. And you can imagine this activity is its aim is to define and design the portfolio of smart city initiative along the overarching set of guidelines, codes and operating model. Second is implementation design. So in this stream, the aim is to implement multiple smart city initiative to illustrate and showcase the benefits of Smart City technologies. And finally, it's the incubate and scale. So in this stream, we incubate enablers such as the smart county platform or the digital twin as just as an illustration, in collaboration with many stakeholder, internal stakeholder large RC one, but also with strategic partners. And we scale them up, we scale up these solutions and services. And by by end of 2022, we have winning the smart city team and we there is a major milestone that was reached is the delivery of the smart city development guidelines, which were also published recently. So these guidelines will assist all sectors in developing Olala county by deploying interconnected strategies and system to effectively provide world class services for the visitors and to the local community of Olala. And starting in 2023. Lately, the department has rebranded actually, we don't call ourself the smart city department, we rebranded into the smart County, and we moved from County's own planning sector to the digital and analytics sector and the team is growing.
07:01
Thank you. Thank you, Richard. I think it's, it's interesting to notice that your role as well evolves as the as the role of the smart city team evolves as the Alola as a development progresses as well. So the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has embarked few years ago when several projects which are impressive both by their scale and by the magnitude, such as Neo or Dre gate, or Kadir to name a few, they all have in common and underpinning Smart City strategy to deliver on their mandate. Can you tell us more about the main characteristic and specificities of falala Smart City strategy by comparison to these other large developments,
07:46
if we have to speak about the characteristic of the smart city strategy, as I mentioned earlier, the smart city strategy is derived and there is a direct claim with the 2030 vision and the RCU vision. It's based on sixth principle, open and transparent, inclusivity trustworthy and secure technology, use in efficient and modern technology is accessible everywhere and always available. And finally, the sixth one is flexible and innovative partnership models. So from these six principles, we've delivered 16 focus areas that also could be grouped into six dimensions, but let's stay with the our 18 focus areas. And these will cascade down into 67 initiative and result into 400 plus services and use cases. And in order to deliver these use cases, we're relying on a a technology and ICT layers from sensing connectivity up to the application part in a nutshell, these are the characteristics of the smart city strategy, and how we're going to articulate it and deliver these services or use cases in in alignment with the overall vision.
09:03
Thank you, Richard. This this is interesting and maybe reflecting on another parallel reflected on your experience with the smart Dubai office. How do you compare Dubai and an OLAP, Smart City journeys and trajectories? So what differences and similarities you have observed in relation with maybe the priorities or the approach taken by both cities?
09:27
Okay. Yeah, very interesting question, actually. And I'm going to be very honest and answer it from from my personal point of view and what I've seen in my from my naked eye, so comparing what I call the Dubai Smart City experience and Lola Smart City experience, the first thing that come up to my mind is from a I would say from a different perspective is at Smart Dubai, we started by building what we call the digital backbone on top of the ICT infrastructure, because we everything was meaning on the ground. Rama connectivity, power cloud etc. So we started with the digital backbone, which is also known as the now the Dubai pulse from a brand perspective. And the old initiative that has been generated and that I worked on are really pure digital perspective like the paperless initiative, the blockchain and Dubai now initiative. On the other hand, when it's RCU, or Alola experience most of the experience, it's starting from a master plan and development and construction. So it's heavy focus from a real estate perspective. And the smart city is supporting these sector through the digital and the data to help the sector to reach the their their mission. So that's the first difference is one is from a pure digital angle, while the other one is really initiated from a master plan and real estate focus. And the second the second difference that I could spot is mainly obvious to me is it's the data maturity today was a couple of years process and data culture change within the Dubai sphere, where they were they started with the Open Data low and the Dubai data low until reaching maturity where now they have a lot of datasets and building a data science teams within different government entities and able to, to crunch these data and generate data driven insights. On the other hand, at Alola, we're just starting the journey this is today we will thinking about how to capture the data and where to store it to have in a data sovereign space. So these are the questions that we are addressing today. And of course, the idea is to scale up in terms of maturity and reach where we are Dubai is today and we are applying the Fast Track techniques, leveraging the experiences of people that are brought into the space is to catch up and reach this maturity. So the So in conclusion, what I can say there's a second difference. The second difference is there are different maturity data maturity scale, that's the two differences that I could spot. And in terms of similarities, being in the digital space we are facing the same challenges Smart City is not about is not only about technology, it's about people and process. So if we have to rephrase the statement, it's so smart city is about community experiences and collaboration. So from that you can already imagine the challenges we face. It's not it's more focus from people challenges and culture. In terms of digital adoption, and data, data maturity, and these these challenges are the same. So that's where the similarities are between whether being in Dubai or being in in Alola, we are facing the same challenges.
12:58
Thank you. Thank you, Richard. This is a very good illustration of based on two projects in the in the region on the differences in terms of journeys and priorities which underpin the the the concept of smart cities, because we might perceive Smart City as a common concept with a common approach to all these projects. I think the example you just you just gave and the parallel between Dubai and and Ola, this is a very good illustration of these, that each project has its own pace and its own journey, actually, and maybe back to an owner as a major project. So there are multiple stakeholders from consultancy firms, architecture and engineering firm contractors, technology companies, service providers, all are involved in almost every phase of the project from design to construction to operation, they all have a certain understanding of what a smart city is and how the concept applies to Alola. But from your perspective as the smart city team, how do you ensure that the the strategy you have defined is cascaded down consistently and reflected across consistently across all the ongoing capital projects?
14:15
Yeah, very interesting question. And I would start by saying the smart city role is a cross sectoral role and in and this is exactly the role that we have within OSUIT. So the smart city department smart county department now has a cross sectoral we're supporting different sectors within RCU to fulfill their missions. And we have two main functions. The first one we have, I call it the enabling pillar function and we're supporting the OSU sector to uncom to accomplish their mission by leveraging digital and data, meaning we have enablers we I spoke about the smart county platform and the digital twin. These are two main enablers that we have in place and that can help and support other set There's whether heritage nature DNC which is the blockchain construction, the sustainability, etc into reaching their or accomplishing their mission. The second role is more the regulator function and the requirement giver. So, we recently published as I mentioned, the smart city development guidelines, these guidelines will really assess the sectors in developing Alola county by deploying interconnected strategies and system to effectively provide world class services to visitors and to the local community of Alola. Also, we are working on delivering what we call the smart city codes. As you may know, the smart city codes provide the necessary framework need to be followed by all stakeholders for an effective design and implementation of smart services. They are principle based, they maintain the link with the strategy. They harmonize the use of adoption of policies, whether international, national or even on a county level. They standardize the use of technology deployment and ensure future proof owners. This is how we are actually cascading down consistently the smart city work into these main capital projects. Yeah,
16:17
thank you, Richard. And maybe in in relation with that. And this will be my my last question. For engineering firms such as ws p. So who are traditionally focused on either on the core technical design and engineering aspect, and on the buildings the master planning the infrastructure and or providing project management services? How do you see them supporting Alola Smart City team in the implementation of these projects, such as the smartcity project, or the digital twin project in the county moving forward,
16:52
there is the concept of what we call the factory model, starting by on a strategic level setting the operating model, then there is the second layer, which is more working on the smart city codes and its compliance, going down to another layer, which is building the conceptual design from a field field device perspective. And finally, to conclude with the fourth layer, which is the value engineering and which closed the loop and meaning it's a cycle that goes back that feedback into the first layer, which is the strategy part, meaning the operating model. So that's our factory. And that's our model that we are working against. To be more specific. For example, as you may know, last year, we initiated our work on the smart city codes, and we target to deliver to deliver them in the coming weeks, I believe that the courts are also a living document. This is something that will evolve over time, and we need to keep them updated. Also, the costs need to be supported by enforcement mechanism to ensure adherence. And finally, I would say we need to ensure the compliance of the code. So this is something that we need to think about what are the ways and techniques to ensure compliance of the code? So yeah, these are the different activities that we will be doing today under the smart county department.
18:17
And this is how you see probably engineering firms such as WFP, with the various types of expertise in, in buildings in energy sustainability, and so on and so forth, contribute to cascading down and maintaining those codes, those guidelines across the county, and across the development phases of the of the county.
18:40
Exactly. So it's updating the meaning we are working into that as the first iteration of the codes, as I mentioned, hopefully will be delivered in the in the coming weeks. That is a update of them. So there is the update of them. As I mentioned, the living documents, so we need to keep them updated. Then second is really is to see the mechanism of enforcement and finally to ensure their compliance. So from a code perspective, these are the three main categories that I definitely see W SP can help us into these areas.
19:12
Thank you. Thank you, Richard, for, for taking the time to answer our questions and to attend these these podcasts and for all these insights you have shared with us and with our listeners, to our audience. Thanks for listening all the way through. Please leave us a comment if today's episode has sparked your interest. And don't forget to join us for a new talk. Stay tuned.
The GCC region is observing an unprecedent number of urban development projects of various types residential, mixed use touristic, etc. These range from cognitive cities such as neon to cultural and touristic destinations such as Ebola. What all these projects have in common is digital as a core pillar of their vision and mandate. Almost all these projects share the ambition to become smart cities in their own way. I am Nizar Jaida, Director of Digital Advisory Services of WSOP Middle East. In this episode of The anticipate podcast, I am pleased to be joined by Richard Dieppe, Smart City advisor at the Royal Commission of Florida. In this episode, we will learn more about Alola Smart City strategy, ambition and journey so far. Hello Richard, welcome to the W SP anticipate podcast
00:58
Thank you Nizar Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be on W SP anticipate podcast
01:03
for the benefit of the audience. Can you share with us an overview of your journey within the smart city space in the region so far? As well as your current role within Allah Allah?
01:14
Okay, so my my journey within the smart city space started in 2014. I transitioned from the from the telecom sector, so I joined a boutique consultancy firm called an exam. I specialize in the smart city and my role back in 2014, was a smart city consultant. And I was helping smart Dubai to set up the initial strategy with its vision mission, its pillars and dimensions, and launched the first I would say the first digital initiative within smart Dubai, we call it the digital backbone of Dubai that will empower its digital transformation also known or rebranded as Dubai pulse. And in 2017, actually, I was asked by the director general of, of smart Dubai, Dr. Aisha Ben Bishop, to join internally her team, the smart Dubai team. And I joined as as the head of Dubai pulse, where I oversaw the implementation with the strategic partner because it was under a PPP agreement, handle the commercial relationship with the strategic partner and was responsible of developing what we call the commercial relationship between the other Dubai government entities and promote Dubai pulse portfolio and services. Over the years more data was flowing onto Dubai florals. And so my role evolved within smart Dubai and become more data focus and acquire the role of a data product director within smart Dubai. And I was responsible on building the data science team. It's an agile squad composed of several profiles, and not only data scientist, and finally in January 2022, I decided to join RCU, the Royal Commission for Allah Allah that is in charge of the development of Allah Allah. It's a county that is situated in the northwest of KSA, in the smart city department working to transform Olala county into a smart County.
03:15
Thank you, Richard. That's an impressive journey in this space, and maybe now zooming into Lola. So in order to provide the audience with some context, it is an area which is almost almost as big as Belgium in the northwest of the kingdom. It's rich with archaeological and heritage sites going back to the Bronze Age, and it's home, also to Hagar, Saudi Arabia first UNESCO site and all else is also home to a community of about 50,000 people and it is currently under development to become a sustainable touristic destination, aiming to attract around 2 million people by 2035 and bring another around 120 billion stars to the kingdom GDP. So given this context, can you tell us what was the Alola smartcity journey so far and how it is contributing or enabling the vision of the county
04:08
the smart city journey within RCU started late 2021. It was initiated by a mandate that was given by the RCU CEO Imran Madani, which resulted into the creation of a smart city department and since that moment, I've been heavily involved into setting what we call the smart city strategy in alignment of course with the 2030 vision but also with the RCU vision. A quick overview on the vision the OSU vision is our aim is to create an outdoor museum to diversify the local economy and to make the county more livable for citizen and seamless tourist experience. So RCU Smart City strategy is based on three main objectives. We call them the triple bottom line. So financial sustainability, environmental sustainability and enhance experience as you can see, it's there. They pull alignment with the with the vision whether 2030 and the RCU. One but also is it there is an alignment with the ITU more specifically with the ITU KPI then dimensions which are the economy environment and sociate the and culture. So, following the smart city strategy, what happened is, we needed some structure. So we organized ourselves into three main activities that is strategy and regulation. And you can imagine this activity is its aim is to define and design the portfolio of smart city initiative along the overarching set of guidelines, codes and operating model. Second is implementation design. So in this stream, the aim is to implement multiple smart city initiative to illustrate and showcase the benefits of Smart City technologies. And finally, it's the incubate and scale. So in this stream, we incubate enablers such as the smart county platform or the digital twin as just as an illustration, in collaboration with many stakeholder, internal stakeholder large RC one, but also with strategic partners. And we scale them up, we scale up these solutions and services. And by by end of 2022, we have winning the smart city team and we there is a major milestone that was reached is the delivery of the smart city development guidelines, which were also published recently. So these guidelines will assist all sectors in developing Olala county by deploying interconnected strategies and system to effectively provide world class services for the visitors and to the local community of Olala. And starting in 2023. Lately, the department has rebranded actually, we don't call ourself the smart city department, we rebranded into the smart County, and we moved from County's own planning sector to the digital and analytics sector and the team is growing.
07:01
Thank you. Thank you, Richard. I think it's, it's interesting to notice that your role as well evolves as the as the role of the smart city team evolves as the Alola as a development progresses as well. So the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has embarked few years ago when several projects which are impressive both by their scale and by the magnitude, such as Neo or Dre gate, or Kadir to name a few, they all have in common and underpinning Smart City strategy to deliver on their mandate. Can you tell us more about the main characteristic and specificities of falala Smart City strategy by comparison to these other large developments,
07:46
if we have to speak about the characteristic of the smart city strategy, as I mentioned earlier, the smart city strategy is derived and there is a direct claim with the 2030 vision and the RCU vision. It's based on sixth principle, open and transparent, inclusivity trustworthy and secure technology, use in efficient and modern technology is accessible everywhere and always available. And finally, the sixth one is flexible and innovative partnership models. So from these six principles, we've delivered 16 focus areas that also could be grouped into six dimensions, but let's stay with the our 18 focus areas. And these will cascade down into 67 initiative and result into 400 plus services and use cases. And in order to deliver these use cases, we're relying on a a technology and ICT layers from sensing connectivity up to the application part in a nutshell, these are the characteristics of the smart city strategy, and how we're going to articulate it and deliver these services or use cases in in alignment with the overall vision.
09:03
Thank you, Richard. This this is interesting and maybe reflecting on another parallel reflected on your experience with the smart Dubai office. How do you compare Dubai and an OLAP, Smart City journeys and trajectories? So what differences and similarities you have observed in relation with maybe the priorities or the approach taken by both cities?
09:27
Okay. Yeah, very interesting question, actually. And I'm going to be very honest and answer it from from my personal point of view and what I've seen in my from my naked eye, so comparing what I call the Dubai Smart City experience and Lola Smart City experience, the first thing that come up to my mind is from a I would say from a different perspective is at Smart Dubai, we started by building what we call the digital backbone on top of the ICT infrastructure, because we everything was meaning on the ground. Rama connectivity, power cloud etc. So we started with the digital backbone, which is also known as the now the Dubai pulse from a brand perspective. And the old initiative that has been generated and that I worked on are really pure digital perspective like the paperless initiative, the blockchain and Dubai now initiative. On the other hand, when it's RCU, or Alola experience most of the experience, it's starting from a master plan and development and construction. So it's heavy focus from a real estate perspective. And the smart city is supporting these sector through the digital and the data to help the sector to reach the their their mission. So that's the first difference is one is from a pure digital angle, while the other one is really initiated from a master plan and real estate focus. And the second the second difference that I could spot is mainly obvious to me is it's the data maturity today was a couple of years process and data culture change within the Dubai sphere, where they were they started with the Open Data low and the Dubai data low until reaching maturity where now they have a lot of datasets and building a data science teams within different government entities and able to, to crunch these data and generate data driven insights. On the other hand, at Alola, we're just starting the journey this is today we will thinking about how to capture the data and where to store it to have in a data sovereign space. So these are the questions that we are addressing today. And of course, the idea is to scale up in terms of maturity and reach where we are Dubai is today and we are applying the Fast Track techniques, leveraging the experiences of people that are brought into the space is to catch up and reach this maturity. So the So in conclusion, what I can say there's a second difference. The second difference is there are different maturity data maturity scale, that's the two differences that I could spot. And in terms of similarities, being in the digital space we are facing the same challenges Smart City is not about is not only about technology, it's about people and process. So if we have to rephrase the statement, it's so smart city is about community experiences and collaboration. So from that you can already imagine the challenges we face. It's not it's more focus from people challenges and culture. In terms of digital adoption, and data, data maturity, and these these challenges are the same. So that's where the similarities are between whether being in Dubai or being in in Alola, we are facing the same challenges.
12:58
Thank you. Thank you, Richard. This is a very good illustration of based on two projects in the in the region on the differences in terms of journeys and priorities which underpin the the the concept of smart cities, because we might perceive Smart City as a common concept with a common approach to all these projects. I think the example you just you just gave and the parallel between Dubai and and Ola, this is a very good illustration of these, that each project has its own pace and its own journey, actually, and maybe back to an owner as a major project. So there are multiple stakeholders from consultancy firms, architecture and engineering firm contractors, technology companies, service providers, all are involved in almost every phase of the project from design to construction to operation, they all have a certain understanding of what a smart city is and how the concept applies to Alola. But from your perspective as the smart city team, how do you ensure that the the strategy you have defined is cascaded down consistently and reflected across consistently across all the ongoing capital projects?
14:15
Yeah, very interesting question. And I would start by saying the smart city role is a cross sectoral role and in and this is exactly the role that we have within OSUIT. So the smart city department smart county department now has a cross sectoral we're supporting different sectors within RCU to fulfill their missions. And we have two main functions. The first one we have, I call it the enabling pillar function and we're supporting the OSU sector to uncom to accomplish their mission by leveraging digital and data, meaning we have enablers we I spoke about the smart county platform and the digital twin. These are two main enablers that we have in place and that can help and support other set There's whether heritage nature DNC which is the blockchain construction, the sustainability, etc into reaching their or accomplishing their mission. The second role is more the regulator function and the requirement giver. So, we recently published as I mentioned, the smart city development guidelines, these guidelines will really assess the sectors in developing Alola county by deploying interconnected strategies and system to effectively provide world class services to visitors and to the local community of Alola. Also, we are working on delivering what we call the smart city codes. As you may know, the smart city codes provide the necessary framework need to be followed by all stakeholders for an effective design and implementation of smart services. They are principle based, they maintain the link with the strategy. They harmonize the use of adoption of policies, whether international, national or even on a county level. They standardize the use of technology deployment and ensure future proof owners. This is how we are actually cascading down consistently the smart city work into these main capital projects. Yeah,
16:17
thank you, Richard. And maybe in in relation with that. And this will be my my last question. For engineering firms such as ws p. So who are traditionally focused on either on the core technical design and engineering aspect, and on the buildings the master planning the infrastructure and or providing project management services? How do you see them supporting Alola Smart City team in the implementation of these projects, such as the smartcity project, or the digital twin project in the county moving forward,
16:52
there is the concept of what we call the factory model, starting by on a strategic level setting the operating model, then there is the second layer, which is more working on the smart city codes and its compliance, going down to another layer, which is building the conceptual design from a field field device perspective. And finally, to conclude with the fourth layer, which is the value engineering and which closed the loop and meaning it's a cycle that goes back that feedback into the first layer, which is the strategy part, meaning the operating model. So that's our factory. And that's our model that we are working against. To be more specific. For example, as you may know, last year, we initiated our work on the smart city codes, and we target to deliver to deliver them in the coming weeks, I believe that the courts are also a living document. This is something that will evolve over time, and we need to keep them updated. Also, the costs need to be supported by enforcement mechanism to ensure adherence. And finally, I would say we need to ensure the compliance of the code. So this is something that we need to think about what are the ways and techniques to ensure compliance of the code? So yeah, these are the different activities that we will be doing today under the smart county department.
18:17
And this is how you see probably engineering firms such as WFP, with the various types of expertise in, in buildings in energy sustainability, and so on and so forth, contribute to cascading down and maintaining those codes, those guidelines across the county, and across the development phases of the of the county.
18:40
Exactly. So it's updating the meaning we are working into that as the first iteration of the codes, as I mentioned, hopefully will be delivered in the in the coming weeks. That is a update of them. So there is the update of them. As I mentioned, the living documents, so we need to keep them updated. Then second is really is to see the mechanism of enforcement and finally to ensure their compliance. So from a code perspective, these are the three main categories that I definitely see W SP can help us into these areas.
19:12
Thank you. Thank you, Richard, for, for taking the time to answer our questions and to attend these these podcasts and for all these insights you have shared with us and with our listeners, to our audience. Thanks for listening all the way through. Please leave us a comment if today's episode has sparked your interest. And don't forget to join us for a new talk. Stay tuned.