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August 31, 2022

Smart Qatar meets the needs of citizens, businesses, and visitors with digital services built on Azure

The State of Qatar has a thriving economy based primarily on oil and natural gas, but the country is increasingly diversifying into information and communication technologies and building a knowledge-based society. Qatar has developed an open, integrated, and extendable platform of national services built on Microsoft Azure to support citizens, residents, businesses, and visitors. The TASMU Platform is helping make the country a better place to live, from health management to national food security, while also boosting its non-oil gross domestic product by 2 percent.

State of Qatar Ministry of Communications and Information Technology

“We chose Microsoft because of the flexibility it provided us to build unique smart city and smart country capabilities on Azure and integrate them with our government shared services, building a national integration environment in a highly secure and scalable way.”

Her Excellency Reem Al Mansoori, Assistant Undersecretary of Digital Society Development, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Qatar

Enabling a digital, knowledge-based economy

On the northeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula is the State of Qatar, which has a rich history and culture in addition to enormous natural gas and oil reserves. The nation's capital, Doha, is known for its unique architecture and gleaming spires, which attract admirers from around the globe. Qatar aspires to diversify beyond a natural resource–based economy and expand further into the digital, knowledge-based realm. The Qatar National Vision 2030 outlines this aim to enhance the Qatari experience for its nearly 3 million citizens, and to make the country even more appealing for tourists, including the large crowds expected for the 2022 FIFA World Cup tournament.

“Qatar’s visionary leadership realized years ago the importance of harnessing emerging technologies and innovation to drive sustainable economic diversification and improve the quality of life for Qatar’s citizens, residents, businesses, and visitors,” says Her Excellency Reem Al Mansoori, Assistant Undersecretary of Digital Society Development at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Qatar.

The cornerstone of these digital ambitions is the Smart Qatar (TASMU) Program, led by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and supported by several key stakeholders across the State of Qatar. Smart Qatar (TASMU) focuses on five priority areas—Transport, Healthcare, Logistics, Environment, and Sports—to address key national challenges. The program relies on the TASMU Platform, a digital solution designed to facilitate the development and deployment of innovative national services.

“The TASMU Platform is a smart city solution that enables a comprehensive digitization shift within Qatar’s public and private sectors,” Her Excellency Al Mansoori says. “Powered by some of the world’s best technologies and digital capabilities, TASMU will ensure an easy and seamless transition toward more secure, collaborative, integrated, and user-centric services to enhance efficiencies and increase the ease of living for all in Qatar.”

Building an open, flexible, and scalable platform for innovation

MCIT brought together a broad consortium of technology experts, including Microsoft Partner Network member Ooredoo as its primary partner and Microsoft as its global technology enabler. To realize the TASMU Platform vision, the consortium is working over a 10-year period to bring the TASMU Platform fully to life. Several individual components have already gone into production and more than 100 will be added over time.

The TASMU Platform is a cloud-native solution, so the choice of a cloud provider was an essential part of the planning process. MCIT chose Microsoft Azure as its trusted cloud platform. "We chose Microsoft because of the flexibility it provided us to build unique smart city and smart country capabilities on Azure and integrate them with our government shared services, building a national integration environment in a highly secure and scalable way," says Her Excellency Al Mansoori. “Microsoft invested in a datacenter in Qatar, which has significantly increased the ability to conform to government regulations regarding data sovereignty, compliance, governance, and essential security standards.”

In addition to Azure, the platform incorporates elements of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, as well as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Microsoft. Developers building solutions through the platform can use a wide range of programming languages and developer frameworks to reduce costs, increase interoperability, decrease learning time, and encourage design flexibility.

MCIT designed the platform to be extensible, allowing a wide range of public and private entities to provide services to benefit Qatar. These contributors can easily connect to the secure integration layer and use APIs and Smart City Services to develop and go to market with their own smart solutions seamlessly.

“The TASMU platform is a data and service hub built on a common data model that spans multiple domains to facilitate data exchange and interoperability,” says Her Excellency Al Mansoori. “Innovators and entrepreneurs can use the TASMU Platform to create, combine, and synthesize their smart solutions by leveraging high-powered data analytics and cutting-edge technology management."

The TASMU Platform empowers participating companies to make smart decisions and generate meaningful insights using dashboards and data visualization tools, allowing them to contribute to the TASMU data ecosystem.

Putting Smart Qatar (TASMU) into action for national benefits

MCIT and contributing government partners identified dozens of potential real-life and actionable projects for Smart Qatar with input from government and industry leaders, and the first solutions went live in July 2021. One of these is Virtual Consultations, a smart solution for healthcare developed in partnership with the Ministry of Public Health. Qatar prioritized the solution in response to the onset of COVID-19, and it is a project that will continue to provide services for the community long after COVID-19. Citizens can remain safely at home and use Virtual Consultations to access medical advice, diagnoses, and prescriptions. The solution’s utility does not end there, however.

“Virtual Consultations are the future for Smart Qatar,” according to Her Excellency Al Mansoori. “We work closely with the Ministry of Public Health to support them to offer this service to the community. It forms the foundation for seamless integration with national electronic medical records, enabling patients to search and find doctors, schedule appointments, and receive automatic notifications of upcoming visits. Physicians will benefit from easier report generation and a more fluid workflow with fewer administrative responsibilities." 

Another active solution, the TASMU Digital Farmer Community, uses real-time weather data and high-resolution satellite images to provide farmers professional advice on production planning, crop best practices, and pest and disease management. Food production is also the focus of the National Food Security Analytics solution, which unlocks the AI-driven decision-making capabilities within the platform. This third solution acts as a centralized database to integrate insights from various stakeholders and provide government officials and business owners with recommendations based on large-scale data analytics to help safeguard food security across Qatar.

Ooredoo has begun to add a smart parking solution to Smart Qatar (TASMU), which will be included in a Smart Qatar (TASMU) mobile smartphone app. “Using sensors in parking lots, the solution counts cars going in and out to track the lot’s occupancy and provide data on available spaces,” explains Mariam Al-Khal, Head of TASMU Platform at Ooredoo. “The mobile app will ultimately help consolidate access to all Smart Qatar services, increasing ease of use for citizens, visitors, and Qatar residents.”

MCIT and its partners will build future Smart Qatar (TASMU) developments around four key pillars. “The first pillar is integrated and holistic management, supported by a city service catalogue and a digital twin to enable seamless access across multiple services using the National Authentication System,” explains Her Excellency Al Mansoori.

The other three pillars focus on the following: providing a single point of contact for a multilingual, omnichannel experience that shares data across different service providers for ease of use; monitoring service level agreements and key performance indicators for Smart Qatar (TASMU) and for national services such as energy, water, and mobility; and overseeing all national platform services and subsystems through the Smart Qatar Command and Control Center (SQ-CC). Partner companies can manage services internally or outsource those responsibilities to the SQ-CC.

Because of the open nature of the platform, it provides important opportunities for data sharing between different government agencies to derive insights that were previously impossible. For example, by merging one agency’s data about crowd management and traffic patterns with another agency’s data about air quality, government experts can do in-depth analysis regarding the nation’s carbon footprint and take action to mitigate excess emissions.

Calculating real-world benefits and embracing collaboration

MCIT designed the Smart Qatar (TASMU) Platform to provide a best-in-class experience for all individuals who access it by taking user needs into account at every stage of development. As the platform evolves, AI will assist applications in understanding and adapting usage patterns to provide a personalized experience for every person. MCIT believes that, in addition to the direct benefits provided to users, the services will help drive the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and economic success within information and communication technologies (ICT).

“With a solid foundation in Azure, we anticipate that TASMU will play a key role in the growth of the ICT sector of Qatar’s digital economy, contributing 2 percent to the non-oil GDP and increasing the ICT sector contribution to 6.5 percent of the GDP, in line with other global technology-driven economies,” Her Excellency Al Mansoori says. The government expects ICT to contribute QAR200 billion (USD55 billion) to the national GDP with the support of the Smart Qatar (TASMU) program, and MCIT predicts a QAR12 billion (USD3.3 billion) return on investment for the TASMU Platform during its lifetime.

Smart Qatar (TASMU) will provide a wide range of information and services to citizens, visitors, and national employees to enhance their daily lives. “To achieve the goals of this nationwide digital agenda, we should all work together, not only as private and public sectors but also as a community and individuals,” Her Excellency Al Mansoori says. “This digital transformation will alter everything; from the way our government operates to the smallest details of a person’s daily life. We can safeguard Qatar’s prosperity and resilience by quickly adapting policies and frameworks to overcome unprecedented situations, such as a global pandemic. By working together, we will ensure an agile, swift, and effective response to any challenge.”

Find out more about State of Qatar Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“This digital transformation will alter everything; from the way our government operates to the smallest details of a person’s daily life.”

Her Excellency Reem Al Mansoori, Assistant Undersecretary of Digital Society Development, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Qatar

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