Technology helps build a new digital government landscape, but which cloud vendors will dominate?

Editor | Zhou Lei

Nowadays, informatization and digitalization have an increasingly greater impact on economic and social development, and the concepts and production methods of the digital economy have been applied to more fields. In the process of digital economic development, effective protection of digital government is needed.

To this end, the concept of digital government is about to emerge and has received great attention from the country and all sectors of society. The 14th Five-Year Plan and the Outline of the Long-Term Goals for 2035 have also made strategic arrangements to improve the level of digital government construction. It can be seen that the government's cloud migration has become a general trend, which not only helps to improve the level of digital government, but also helps the construction of smart cities. It is actually a win-win choice.

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 is undoubtedly a big test for the government's governance capabilities, and once again sounded the alarm for government and urban governance. In order to ensure the stable and efficient operation of the government in times of crisis, it is necessary to actively use digital means to control the epidemic. It is not difficult to see that the future form of digital government will be a fusion of "government cloud + big data".

In recent years, all parts of the country have steadily promoted the construction of digital government. The efficiency of government services in Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hubei and other places has been significantly improved, and the construction of digital government has achieved certain results. According to relevant data, the average national digital government construction index is 51.7, of which 14 provinces, cities and districts have reached the average or above. However, there are still problems such as information systems not being interoperable, data being difficult to open and share, low levels of data resource utilization, and potential security risks. The phenomenon of information islands is still prominent.

Whether it is the construction of digital government or smart city, the key point is to tap the value of data, followed by the use of new-generation information technologies such as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc. to integrate, share and open government data, so as to achieve cross-departmental, cross-system, cross-regional and cross-level business collaboration.

At present, outstanding enterprise representatives from the central enterprise camp, operator camp, Internet camp, and technology camp are closely following the pace of digital government construction and have joined the smart city track, committed to helping local governments and provinces and cities to successfully go to the cloud. From the time of entry, it can be seen that the major camps started their efforts at roughly the same time, but they found the track they are good at and continued to dig deep.

The central enterprise camp is mainly represented by China Electronics Cloud. With the full-stack capabilities of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, China Electronics Cloud has independently developed a new generation of digital economic infrastructure "native to PKS". Its main security advantage lies in the fact that digital government infrastructure carries the key core business of the digital economy and faces great security challenges. In addition, since the promulgation of the Data Security Law, higher security requirements have been put forward for the construction of digital government infrastructure. China Electronics Cloud is committed to building a safer digital infrastructure.

The operator camp is mainly represented by China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. All three have built their own distinctive cloud bases. Among them, Tianyi Cloud practices the concept of "5G+Cloud+AI" to create a cloud-network integration base and digital platform. Mobile Cloud takes the four integrations of "cloud-network, cloud-edge, cloud-computing and cloud-intelligence" as its core competitiveness. At the same time, relying on its construction of the world's largest cloud private network, it has improved the latency-based routing and path protection capabilities for large customers. At the same time, based on the SRv6 technology, it opens up network capabilities and introduces bearer network slicing, end-to-end cross-domain activation, business chain and other capabilities. WoCloud relies on the differentiated advantages of "security and reliability, cloud-network integration, exclusive customization, and multi-cloud collaboration" to create a digital transformation base that mainly assists the government in building a unified IT support environment and provides government agencies with basic cloud services as well as the software and hardware conditions for network office.

The Internet camp is mainly represented by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and JD. The three companies mainly focus on government cloud. Relying on the rich technical experience accumulated in the Internet field, they are committed to conducting deeper practices based on building a cloud base. Of course, stimulated by the craze for digital government and smart cities, it has also attracted companies with strong technological attributes including Huawei, Inspur, and iFLYTEK to join in.

As mentioned earlier, the most important thing in building a digital government is to maximize the value of data. Through Leifeng.com's observations, it was found that in the past two years, JD Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud have had the strongest momentum. While these three companies are consolidating their digital foundations, their differentiated practices have also attracted widespread attention from all walks of life.

1. Huawei Cloud focuses on digital infrastructure construction

The key to building a digital government is to tap into the value of data, which is also the main focus of Huawei Cloud. From cooperating with local governments in 2016, to launching the concept of "Urban Intelligence" in 2018, to building an application-centric cloud native infrastructure today, the goal is to provide a solid foundation for the value of data.

Yang Ping, Vice President of Huawei EBG China, once emphasized that in terms of smart cities, Huawei's positioning is to build the nervous system of smart cities and to be the enabler and promoter of smart cities. The nervous system of smart cities includes the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. Therefore, smart cities must not only have a city brain, but also various information perception systems to achieve a complete closed loop of data uploading, analysis, processing, decision-making and action.

Through the technical experience and practical experience accumulated through early cooperation with local governments, the concept of "smart city" is emerging, and on this basis, solutions such as the "smart brain" system and urban digital platform have been proposed and constructed, thus forming a "platform + ecology" development strategy.

In short, in terms of smart cities, Huawei Cloud provides a digital infrastructure downward and a platform upward to build a complete ecosystem.

This strategy is mainly based on Huawei's traditional advantages. First, Huawei is a traditional ICT infrastructure supplier with natural advantages in cloud data centers, basic networks, and storage. This provides a solid foundation for urban intelligence and aggregates the data generated by various systems and departments in the city during operation.

Secondly, under the new infrastructure policy, the emergence and development of new-generation information technologies such as 5G, edge computing, and artificial intelligence have provided new impetus for the construction of Huawei Cloud smart cities. Based on new ICTs such as big data, the Internet of Things, GIS, video cloud, and converged communications, this series of information technologies will be integrated with the smart city system to build an integrated intelligent system that collaborates with the cloud, network, and edge. By integrating and governing the city's entire data, the city can achieve digital management.

As Yang Ping said, both the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system have utilized Huawei's experience in traditional ICT infrastructure. The "central nervous system" of the smart city, that is, the brain of the smart city, corresponds to the city's intelligent operation center and the city's big data center, which can detect various operating indicators of the city, and can also support urban emergency linkage and analysis and decision-making; and the "peripheral nervous system", that is, the city's perception network system, corresponds to the city's Internet of Things, and wired and wireless communication networks, which can realize the automatic collection and transmission of data from all scenarios in the city.

The city digital platform utilizes new ICT capabilities and integrates information technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence to achieve data integration, business collaboration and agile innovation. The platform enables the sharing of various underlying resources and maximizes the release of capabilities, while laying the foundation for subsequent data integration, data operation and value-added, and application integration.

Now, as we enter the era of Government Cloud 3.0, Huawei Cloud has once again recognized the important role of cloud in the construction of smart cities. From an application perspective, it has built an application-centric cloud native infrastructure and achieved comprehensive management and control of the government cloud business life cycle, thereby providing digital governments with professional and refined business operations and promoting the long-term and sustainable development of digital governments.

In an interview with the media, Zhang Pingan once said that Huawei Cloud's future mission is to make cloud ubiquitous, intelligence all-encompassing, and jointly build the cloud foundation for the intelligent world. This is also our future strategic development direction.

Whether it is the construction of infrastructure networks, the operation of intelligent operating systems, or the AI ​​empowerment of a large number of application scenarios, Huawei relies on cloud technology and cloud foundation. At present, the Shanghai Huangpu District Urban Operation Center has built a "one-network management" platform based on the urban intelligent body technology foundation, effectively reducing the time for handling urban events by 20%, and the AI ​​artificial intelligence dispatch rate accounts for 80% of the total work orders, and the accuracy rate of machine dispatch (AI+RPA) reaches 88%, truly replacing manpower with machines and increasing efficiency with intelligence.

2. JD Cloud: Data-centric “One Network Management”

Focusing on JD Cloud Smart City, Zheng Yu, Vice President of JD Group, believes that digital government and smart city should start from real business needs. Today, data is the fifth production factor after land, labor, capital and technology. As the manager of data assets, the government has the right and obligation to give full play to the value of data assets. However, there are still data islands and data cannot be shared. This is mainly due to the lack of a unified base and ecological foundation. To this end, JD Cloud has built a smart city operating system.

The "smart city operating system" is equivalent to the digital and technological foundation of a smart city. It uses many cutting-edge technologies such as spatiotemporal data engines, AI algorithms, and visualization analysis technologies to enable high-quality dialogue on the massive amount of information generated during the city's operations, effectively solving the fundamental problem of information communication and sharing during the construction of smart cities.

Although the construction of digital government and smart city requires a unified basic platform to lay a solid foundation, it also requires the coordination between various systems in the city to complete refined management. Zheng Yu said that the smart city operating system is the core positioning of JD Cloud. In order to reflect the strength of the digital base and promote the collection and update of government information, it is necessary to do business traction on it. Just like Microsoft must make Office applications after making Windows, the smart city operating system is equivalent to Windows, and the city governance (one network management) is equivalent to Office, which connects the government, enterprises, and people's livelihood.

Today, we can clearly see that JD Cloud Smart City has been focusing on "city governance", which is what distinguishes JD Cloud Smart City from other vendors. Zheng Yu believes that the construction of digital government needs to go through five stages: the first stage is the informatization of various vertical business systems in the city; the second stage is one-stop service; the third stage is the intelligent brain in the vertical field; the fourth stage is the "one-network unified management" of urban governance, that is, the modernization of city governance; the fifth stage is the dual-network integration stage of one-network unified management and one-network unified management.

From the informatization of a single departmental business to the one-network management of urban governance, that is, the modernization of municipal governance, digital government has now reached a new stage of "one-network management". Following the progress of digital government construction, JD Cloud clearly recognizes the importance of municipal governance to digital government construction in the one-network management stage.

In Zheng Yu's view, city governance is the specific implementation of promoting the modernization of the national governance system and governance capabilities within the city. Based on this, JD Cloud proposed to build a modern city governance system based on the smart city operating system, and innovated a new paradigm of "one network for unified management".

The modernization of urban governance is to connect the middle platform of various urban governance systems and the physical center of the entire management area, so as to achieve "one network to manage the whole city, one center to manage the whole area, and one team to manage governance". On the basis of connecting the data of various departments in the city, the modernization of urban governance can further connect the business systems of various departments, so that instructions can flow between different departments and complete the efficient and coordinated handling of events. At the same time, the physical organization of the urban governance command center is established to integrate the relevant departments such as urban management, comprehensive governance, 12345, etc.

At present, Beijing, Shanghai and other urban areas have accumulated practical experience in government digital upgrades with the help of JD Cloud. Nantong, Jiangsu has even built the country's first modern urban governance command center with the help of the smart city operating system.

The modernization of urban governance requires not only the construction of a "one-network management" system, but also the establishment of a physical institution of the urban governance command center. Through technological innovation and mechanism innovation, it can realize the value of analysis and judgment to assist decision-making, monitoring and early warning to prevent risks, joint command of administrative effectiveness, and co-construction and sharing of grassroots governance.

At the level of technological innovation, the "one-network management" of urban governance is based on one-network perception of urban status and one-network sharing of urban data, with the linkage of large, medium and small screens as the method of information flow, and digital twins as the bridge of virtual-reality mapping and the interface for human-computer interaction, so that various departments can collaborate efficiently, all levels can act in unison, and various events can be handled in a closed loop, ensuring the safety, stability and development of the city.

In terms of mechanism innovation, on the one hand, we need to establish a physical institution of the city governance command center, and integrate relevant departments such as urban management, comprehensive governance, and 12345 with it. On the other hand, we need to strengthen performance evaluation and incorporate the timeliness and completeness of data sharing into departmental evaluation to ensure better data aggregation and sharing, and optimize departmental work efficiency and disposal processes.

At present, 10 counties (cities and districts) and 66 municipal departments in Nantong City have shared a total of 4,095 data resources. Li Xueyi, deputy secretary-general of the Nantong Municipal Party Committee and secretary of the Municipal Governance Modernization Command Center, introduced that the command center gathers information on all aspects of people's lives in real time. By studying and analyzing the information, it can timely grasp the hot spots and pain points of public concern and serve the people more accurately.

At the Nantong Municipal Governance Modernization Command Center, staff receive many clues, big and small, every day. Some are reported from 12345 and online channels, and some are discovered by grassroots staff. It is understood that the command center has built 1 city-level command center, 10 county (city, district) command centers and 96 township and street command centers. More than 70,000 grid workers are on the front line, uploading various emergencies to the command center.

Since 2019, JD Cloud has joined hands with the Suqian Municipal Government to promote the city's government cloud, solving the problem of information islands in each department. The Suqian Government Cloud has completed the migration of 309 systems of 75 units in the city to the cloud, with a cloud migration rate of up to 98.9%. Core information systems including the "One Network" system, public resource platform, provident fund system, etc. have been migrated to the government cloud platform.

On the cloud, in 2021, Suqian City and JD Cloud jointly created a sample of digital transformation for small and medium-sized cities. With the technical support of JD Smart City Operating System, Suqian City's Urban Governance Modernization Command Center promotes the integration of three networks of "comprehensive governance, urban management, and emergency response" around the goal of "one screen to view the whole city, one network to manage the whole city, and one terminal to benefit the whole city", builds the four major governance patterns of "big comprehensive governance, big urban management, big emergency response, and big transportation", and vigorously implements the deep integration of data, systems, grids, resources, business, and personnel. Focusing on being easy to use, effective, and practical, it successfully guaranteed major command and dispatch activities in Suqian City, such as the 2021 JD Suqian Marathon, the 2021 China Wine Capital Cultural Tourism Festival, and the 2021 High School Entrance Examination.

Luo Zhihong, Deputy Secretary-General of the People's Government of Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, Director of the Municipal Government Office (Research Office), Director of the Municipal Big Data Management Bureau, and Director of the Municipal Governance Modernization Command Center, said that the deep integration of digitalization, intelligence with economy, society, and governance is a general trend. Suqian City actively promotes the transformation of the digital governance system, and uses digital technology applications and concept innovation, institutional innovation, and method innovation to create a municipal governance modernization command center and a "1+9+N" three-level command system. It vigorously promotes the deep integration of systems, data, applications, and technologies, and promotes a "five-cross coordination" mechanism across levels, regions, systems, departments, and businesses, which effectively improves the capacity and level of urban governance and provides a Suqian solution for the urban governance of small and medium-sized cities across the country.