Edwin Diender

Edwin Diender is CDTO and Vice President of Government & Public Sector in the Global Government Business Unit of Huawei Enterprise.

Diender is considered a blue ocean strategist, thought leader and a frequent speaker at events around the world. Adept in a range of subjects, from big data to safe and smart cities, to enterprise solutions. He is globally involved in several (public and private) programs and initiatives; scaling from small up to medium and large roll-outs throughout the value chain. Providing insights into the value of digital transformation, bridging physical and digital economies and helping create digital twins.

Experienced in digital transformation and bringing to-market concepts and solutions for Smart City/Safe City and eGovernment, including Collaboration and AI-enabled Business Processes, Big (Video) Data Analytics, and the Economics of Smart Cities.
 

Edwin Diender has a considerable background with an MBA in International Business and Marketing and a PhD in the areas of business economics and sustainable business models. Some of Edwin’s early successes were in 2005 when he co-developed and launched Secure Converged Communications in Europe and the introduction one of the 1st IP-communications platforms that he pitched ‘as a service’ in the Dutch market in 1998. Edwin Diender is an expert with a proven track record on a large range of subjects, tools and platforms building and research.

His work comprehends working in areas that have a scope from converged communications, technology 360, change management, sustainable business strategies and implementations, to AI, IOT, big data to safe city/smart cities, to enterprise solutions. Edwin Diender is a Tech and business strategist, accustomed to large ideas, and concepts.

He has been globally involved and leading several initiatives and programs; scaling from small up to medium and large roll-outs across the value chain. Mr. Diender is experienced in bringing to-market cutting-edge new concepts and solutions for ICT governance for cities and countries, Smart City/Safe City and eGovernment, including Collaboration-enabled Business Process (CEBP), Big (Video) Data Analytics, and the Economics of Smart Cities – Smart nations.

At the end of 2011, Mr. Diender joined Huawei to help establish the Industry Solution Sales practice for the WEU region. He became the spokesperson for global analyst organizations and international media in 2013. Mr. Diender is a coach and mentor to new recruits and employees and a part-time lecturer in Huawei University. He is in contact with non-profit boards, standardization bodies and advisory councils such as UN-Habitat, ABAC and WEF, among others. In 2015, he was appointed CTO in the UC&C Marketing and Solution Sales department at Huawei Head Office, in Shenzhen. In 2018 he was awarded Most Valued Professional (MVP) in Huawei Enterprise. In 2016 he became Vice President of the Government & Public Sector in the Global Government Business dept. Since 2018 he is also the vice leader of the Marketing & Solution Sales dept., High-Level Executive Communications Leadership Team.

Edwin currently holds the position of Chief Digital Transformation Officer in the Enterprise Business Group, where he helps customers and partners with business growth, innovation and their digital journey, focusing on Smart City/Safe City Economics, eGovernment and Government Cloud, Big Data Analytics and Digital Transformation for Smart Cities, leveraging the Universal Framework for Smart City Construction. Work on Intelligent City technology and platforms As CDTO and Vice President in Huawei.

Helped introduce the Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) as the Brain and Nervous System for Intelligent Cities in 2017. And since then he has been a global strategist for intelligent cities and related systems and services. His work touches on the areas of scalability and the idea of creating: “networks of smart cities, smart regions and smart nations”. This is a concept critical for our times and special in the present times when the world economic elements and cities and nations are changing with the economic crisis but also as entire countries and organizations plus their people have to become digital to keep their businesses afloat. Some of Mr Diender’s achievements in this area include the development and launching of the Universal Framework for Intelligent City Construction via the principle of the Rubik’s cube (2019) and in 2016 ‘First Safe Then Smart’ as a principle for the safe city-to-smart city transformation.
 

Building a Smart City - Diender's vision: In a smart city scenario, all technologies need to work together to become efficient and useful for the city, and that needs planning, vision and strategy. Diender recently said in an interview for citiesabc:

“Although technically speaking we have great systems and services, making indeed a digital platform, for Huawei it would be more on a conceptual level as well. We’re also looking at it as something like the principle of a platform. A platform that’s capable of linking different programs and initiatives that would allow and help a city, or a residential area, or what have you, move higher up the value chain. And these different programs and initiatives combined eventually could lead to, let’s say, a Smarter City.” “Artificial Intelligence would be a component where you could think of pieces of technology that do not require any pre-configuration, any pre-staging, and maybe not even configuration, or onsite implementations. What we mean by that is to for example consider Artificial Intelligence almost like the brain of a child, full of potential and waiting for that potential to be unlocked; via learning-by-example, and learning-by-doing,” said the expert.

Another important technology is IoT. “One example of the Internet of Things in Intelligent Cities is where all things are connected to create a more holistic view of anything and everything that goes on in a certain area, which is very key for City Managers to understand what goes on in their city and if they need to anticipate it. The Internet of Things allows us, together with backend infrastructures where big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence components sit, to help us in the decision-making tree and to shorten the decision-making process.

To be more on point, if you like; or because of the time-saving component within it, it gives us more time to rethink, or to think better about the decision that we’re about to make, which lowers the level of mistakes, actually,” added Diender.

“As said, having technology that allows us to do better what we already do best.” Iot and AI generate a huge amount of data coming from the city. If officials are to use that data and make better decisions out of them, they need to understand it first. We need to aggregate all these different information systems, and we need to pull all this information from these information systems into a backend infrastructure; we need to blend it, and we need to structure all that data from an unstructured point of view. But we also need to do something with the right language that it’s been written in, or the right format that it’s been stored and archived in, in order to create the wanted insights as opposed to information” commented the CDTO.”