Excellence 4.0 in the public sector: some lessons from the UAE experience

Current times demand, more than ever, for organizational excellence to be updated as a concept and implemented with ambition for addressing many critical societal challenges. Among such challenges, digital transformation forces us to consider new paradigms, such as Quality 4.0 or Excellence 4.0 (Zairi, 2018; Saraiva et al., 2019), with the public sector playing a major potential role in leading the way and driving organizational excellence efforts (Saraiva, 2018). Under this context, from the many international initiatives and results that are taking place across the world (Saraiva, 2016; Saraiva et al., 2019), what deserves recognition is that the events happening in the UAE, under the leadership of its government, is really inspiring and establishes a strong platform of best practices, with strong and impactful results, from many points of view. Among many other programs that have been designed and deployed, in the next paragraphs, I will briefly outline some of the key features related with my analysis and experience with both the Sheikh Khalifa Government Excellence Program (www.skgep.gov. ae/en) and the Abu Dhabi Award for Excellence Program (www.adaep.ae/en). The underlying models and approaches adopted are quite innovative, including a sound, deep and updated view of what quality and excellence mean in the present century and worldwide environment (Sampaio and Saraiva, 2010). Broad and rather complete views are assumed, together with a consistent set of pillars and criteria for assessment, where it becomes quite easy to connect what is being done (capabilities) with the performances being achieved (results). But rather than just relying on a very sound excellence model, in the UAE, we are witnessing improvement that takes place in a consistent and persistent way, through a really ambitious Government Excellence System (www.skgep.gov.ae/en), with a number of interesting features: