Page 9 - Microsoft Word - Connected City Blueprint

Page 9 - Microsoft Word - Connected City Blueprint - V1 (JPEG TABLES).docx

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• How are people moving around the city related to trash collection and does it depend on the mode of
transportation that they are using? If more cars produce less trash, but more pollution, can those effects
be analyzed?

• If constituents are empowered to report potholes, does that lead to quicker repairs and reduced bus
transportation delays, making movement through the city faster and improving transit ridership?
• When different agencies share data, can they combine resources to get projects done faster and
more cheaply? Can they more quickly complete construction projects because information is more
easily accessible?
Smart Cities can be an extraordinary economic development tool, but can also create their own transformation
because the culture of collecting and sharing data within agencies will most likely affect how employees work and
even potentially create new types of jobs to analyze and respond to the new information. This is another component
of the culture shift that happens from becoming “smarter” because internal and field employees may need to be
educated about the changes in their job and the roles they play and the new opportunities available to them with
new and valuable information.
The smart nature of a city becomes a strong foundation for continually improving the collective intelligence of the
organization, the ability to collect more specialized data based on what they have learned that they need, the type of
experiments that they are willing to take, the coordination between agencies and the incorporation of participation
and feedback from constituents.

But this concept of a Smart City is essentially a front-end concept - the back-end is also an extremely crucial
component. This involves the network for communicating data back to the servers to how data is collected either by
sensors or employees out in the field by using handheld devices, as well as how the data is stored and shared
throughout city agencies and the public. This will be discussed later in this document. We will also cover several cases
of Smart City pilot projects in this blueprint in order to help show how cities can take steps to become smarter
themselves.

Unfortunately, right now most cities face many different obstacles towards becoming Smarter:
• Infighting or lack of cooperation between agencies

• Fear of sharing data
• Inability to analyze any new data collected

• Insufficient funding for Smart City initiatives
• Cultural resistance throughout the city and various agencies

The concept of Smart Cities is very broad and different people will have different views; if you ask a dozen city
officials what it means to be a ‘smart city’, you'll probably get 20 or 30 different answers, because people are still
trying to figure out the intricacies of the term. It is important to define a framework that would be the platform by
which cities would become smarter. The identification of different programs in a city that have all been worked on
and prioritized to help put a city on a path to becoming smarter. It's also important to note that the smart city
concept is not necessarily new, with several cities around the world already offering excellent smart services.
Becoming smarter is about using the new wave of technology to become more responsive and more data-driven.
Populations and constituencies need more and more services from their cities - they have higher and higher
expectations of politicians and city officials, because they have built higher expectations in their everyday life with
other service providers that they engage with.

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