# Data-Driven Decisions in Smart Cities: A Digital Transformation Case Study
## 3 Methodology, Material, and Methods
### Business Background  
Nafeza is the Egyptian national platform for foreign trade facilitation. The principal objective of Nafeza design is twofold. From one side, it enables foreign trade stakeholders (shipping lines, importers, exporters, and brokers) to submit the necessary documents (either hard or soft copies) to release imports and exports through a single entry point (a single window). On the other side, it streamlines and governs foreign trade procedures (importation and exportation). Then, the clearance procedures continue with controlled human intervention to maintain transparency. The time elapsed between the official registration of the clearance documents until the final approval to release goods is referred to as clearance time. Clearance time is a commonly recognized performance index [32]. Maintaining the balance between preserving the governance of procedures and reducing the clearance time is a foremost challenge for the Nafeza. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the clearance procedures are compound and overlapping. These procedures include document review, compliance inspection for incoming and outgoing goods, and laboratory analyses in some cases. It is also worth noting that many official bodies are involved in the release process. Customs comes at the forefront of these authorities and many other regulatory authorities (other governmental agencies--OGAs). Figure 1 shows a simplified process diagram of the clearance process. Figure 1: Simplified process diagram of the clearance process. To achieve its objectives, Nafeza provides a full suite of integrated software components that automate the processes of the governmental parties involved in the clearance procedures for Customs and OGAs. Nafeza's software components include (and are not limited to) processing of the single administrative document (SAD), inspection, valuation, approvals from OGAs, risk management, business intelligence, and data analytics components. For simplicity, we will refer to the business intelligence and data analytics components of Nafeza as _data analytics_ for the remainder of this article. Nafeza services are provided to the foreign trade community and all bodies involved in the exportation and importation clearance procedures, including Customs and OGAs, through an extensive network of logistics centers. Recalling that maintaining the balance between preserving the governance of procedures and reducing the clearance time is a foremost challenge for Nafeza, the following question intuitively imposes itself: How can data analytics help decision-makers take decisions that effectively contribute to achieving this balance? Generically, this question is rephrased in the research question: How does BDA influence decision-making in smart cities as a data-driven decision-making enabl? Unquestionably, relying on business intelligence and data analytics is the rational approach to deal with this question. The case study of this research represents an actual contribution of the author with the BI team in the firm responsible for the development, deployment, and implementation of Nafeza. Within the scope of this contribution, we developed a data analytics system for monitoring daily business operations to identify any stumbling block that negatively affects the clearance time in the logistic centers. The essence of this task is providing decision-makers with fact-based information to help make the necessary decisions to improve (i.e., reduce) the clearance time. In other words, it allows this firm to transform into a data-driven organization. Providing helpful, fact-based information seamlessly in a way that is understandable to decision-makers is a considerable challenge faced during this mission. In this context, it is worth noting that we deal with three levels of decision-makers, namely, strategic, operational, and public. The strategic level includes the top-level management of the ministries concerned with foreign trade and the firm's board of directors responsible for Nafeza.