Page 53 - Microsoft Word - Connected City Blueprint

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10 Big Data: Challenges, opportunities and benefits for Cities

Cities are looking to the Big Data opportunity to enable public agencies to better anticipate citizens’ needs, improve
delivery of services, and reduce inefficiencies.

Increasingly, we have seen cities embarking on national-level data initiatives. The objective is to make both public and
private data sets available to companies to build new and innovative solutions to create a smarter city. Big data is one
of those opportunities that is as much cultural as it is technical. What we see is the promise of big data is that we can
get insights and make better decisions as an organization and as a community. What that involves though is, at
maturity level 1, where we've been, is we just to publish a lot of information for transparency. It's not curated well, but
there's basic information that people have access to. One step further that we see is that there's some regional
collaboration and that we can push out information in a curated way that's consistent, so that we can make some
decisions and insights, not just about ourselves and all we see as ourselves, but as peers, as other service providers, as
well as the information that we're getting from the communities we serve. That broader and richer data set is what we
see the next value point being.
From there, the third level and second and third can be interchanged. Cities have to develop that approach and
culture in their organization to be a data driven organization. That means teaching cities how to be a good data

scientist? Because it's not farfetched to say that someone misreads something, and makes large decisions incorrectly,
and it has a major negative repercussion for a long time in a local government, and the state government. You have to
make sure that we're doing the right things and we can sustain that work, and that there's enough quality in that work.

It's not just that there being lots of data out there, but that we are also interpreting it well and using it well and
validating that use.

The major challenges and the benefits that cities have on Big Data is that, when it works, it's beautiful. With predictive
policing, for example, you can make sure that you read situations and your police department is there to intercept and

stop potentially major crimes.

When looking at how much data is in a utility system, a number of questions can arise. Are we managing the flow? Are

we using electricity correctly? Are we limiting the amount of water we’re wasting? Is the product and the testing being
there so we have high quality water and we're doing that regulatory reporting? All of this is essential to what Cities do.
Cities are having so many data inputs that the fourth level of maturity allows for a clear understanding of the entire

organization and community.

That raised the issue for the cities as well, in terms of if they not only need to align within the city agencies, but even
beyond the city, almost at a county level or a state level interaction with other cities. It's a topic that someone raised
already, on that importance of having a wider partnership and alignment, even beyond the city.

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