The flagship city of Smart Cities world-wide has already surpassed 600 projects, among more than 40 entities, related to intelligent cities. As reported by Okan Geray of the Smart Dubai Office, "it was a combination of strategy and innovation," which is going through its third phase: past instances of E-government and Smart Government, now face Smart Cities, with the objective to ensure the adoption of everything digitized. "If these developments are not used, nothing is being enabled, no impact has been created," he warned.

Geray pointed out the five constituent elements of the city: government, economy, citizen, resources and infrastructure. The first decision of a Smart City should be to decide what to digitize in these elements, and fundamentally to define what the impact should be, with clear goals: "The three areas of impact are the life of the citizen; environment; and financial impact. Any solution that is implemented must take into account these three impacts. "