INTO A DIGITALIZED FUTURE OF GRAND CASABLANCA

Posté le 09/03/2018 par Admin Admin

Since 2015, Casablanca has been engaged in a new strategy that focuses on the digital transformation of the city management. The agenda adopted for the development of Grand Casablanca, and which has been submitted to His Majesty the King Mohamed IV, aims at upgrading Casablanca to the range of smart cities. To this effect, Casablanca city has developed and promotes a new urban vision that it aspires to an accessible and a competitive city that provides a congenial environment to live in, it aspires to a smart city.

How?

By building a more flexible and responsive communication gateway between the citizens and the public administration, through reshaping the bonds between the people of Casablanca and their city.

Forget about the administrative complexities, the need for papers and documents, and roundtrips because the strategy brought along paves the way to a competitive digital offer, improvements in the business environment and the lifestyle of the citizens of Casablanca, and most importantly leads to procedural simplification (e-administration, civil status documents, commercial license, etc.)

To this end, and in order to carry out the digital transformation of Casablanca, Casablanca Prestations, a local development company, was commissioned by the City Council to study the development of the Blueprint of the Digital Transformation of Casablanca in collaboration with two expert firms, one national and one is international, specialized in the field. The Blueprint, which was approved by Casablanca City Council during February 2018 Session, has helped develop an operational vision of the digital transformation of Casablanca, while considering the engagement of all stakeholders of the city and strengthening their relations by pooling and synergy between local, public and private actors.

The aim is to produce a comprehensive plan for the digital fitting-out and development of services to the users, for the sake of digital transformation of the city. Smart City services aim at better serving every component, be it citizens, corporations, tourists, associations, or state administrations, through a modern management of the city.

New digital services

The Blueprint aims at providing a digital source for the improvement of urban management and reinforcement of the overall attractiveness of the city of Casablanca by offering services that are harmonized with its status as a Smart City. The services are divided, below, into five categories:

Administrative Services notably the e-administration and public engagement;
Services of general public interest including culture, tourism and even public safety;
Citizen mobility Services i.e. transportation and even parking;
Urban Services to improve waste management and upgrade street furniture;
Environment-related Services including pollution control and green space management.

The application mapping of Casablanca city Information System will cover four main areas.

The first area is « piloting ». The aim of it is to provide digital tools that would improve the traceability and efficiency of the city governance, to ensure taking more efficient decisions in connection with the city management. Further, this transformation will strengthen visibility and control through the provision of a decision-making support tool for internal audit tasks.

The second area « professions » aims at facilitating the management of core professional activities of Casablanca. It will enable the digitalization of various procedures that are often handled in a rush. The various target information systems fulfill this vision of an attractive, modern and accessible city that embraces all economic, fiscal, social, and community life aspects.

The third area « support » is expected to optimize human and logistic resources for a better focus on the expectations of stakeholders. Citizens must no long incur mismanagement or delay issues; the foreseen information system will help overcome these difficulties.

The last area « communication » offers a range of communication tools devoted to citizens and businesses:

An urban management platform for city management « Casa Urban Platform » ;
Internet and intranet portal
Customer Relationship Management considering the relation with citizens.

Map of the target Information System of Casablanca

In the same context, the city will have another platform called “Casa Urban Data” which pools all the data that are shareable between administrations and citizens. Such platform will include two types ofdata:

Repositories: present all static data that constitute the building blocks of the Information System and which share the feature of adjustability only on an ad hoc basis.

Data pool: contains all the shared, static, and perennial data used by other block of the Information System. It will help pooling data and mutualize their use by different sub-systems in order to avoid inconsistency or redundancy.

The platform will be culminated by the creation of an open data portal where the open data of the city will be available to the public.

Realization?

The realization of the digital transformation will take place between 2018 and 2022 and will cover a portfolio of about 70 projects divided into four main categories :

Smart City Projects ;
Information System Projects ;
Amenities and Infrastructure Projects ;
Accompanying Projects.

The realization timetable took into consideration, through its development, the priority of each project. A dedicated unit will undertake the follow-up of this realization.