Future Proofing Smart City Investments

I've had the opportunity to meet & discuss with several mayors, council members, city managers, department heads and CXO's the topic of urban challenges facing their cities, what they are doing to address them, and most importantly what smart city means for their community. The topic of smart cities has generated a lot of enthusiasm in city halls for the opportunity it presents to address a range of challenges - traffic congestion, crime, digital divide, climate change, economic development, driving innovation, streamlining city operations to name a few. As much as there is enthusiasm, it is not too difficult to see that many experienced city executives are cautiously optimistic.

While the magnitude of the challenges, the need to address them, and the availability of scalable solutions to address some of the issues are real, one might wonder what the reason for the cautious optimism is! Its because the experienced city executives clearly understand that there are significant barriers that need to be systematically addressed before a wider adoption can be made possible. Some of the oft repeated ones include: lack of funding, stakeholders operating & making decisions in their organizational silos, disconnected system & data silos that hardly talk to each other, and the overall complexity in implementation & adoption. Given the evolving technologies & standards, city executives are also concerned if their investments are future proof.

Given the silo'ed nature of city governments, it will not be uncommon to see different departments in a city charting their own course for smart project initiatives or cobbling together point solutions that solves the immediate and most pressing needs. For example the police department implementing a gun shot detection solution to proactively monitor high crime areas, the public works or utilities department converting to LED luminaires and enabling smart controls for energy savings, and the traffic department implementing traffic signal preemption for first responders and public transit vehicles. Each one of these solutions perform well standalone. But can they coordinate seamlessly? Faced with an emergency situation, a lot of manual coordination either through 911 operators, city command & control center, or department emergency operations center will be required to take advantage of the capabilities in these disparate solutions. As first responders can testify, in emergency situations every second saved can be invaluable either in preventing a crime, apprehending an offender or in saving a victim's life. This siloed approach did not factor in the seamless handling of a critical situation from the time of emergency alert was raised all the way through the response by different first-responder departments.

As represented in the left, imagine if in the future the city were to be interested in implementing a seamless, end-to-end Alert to Action process to handle emergency calls. A gun shot was fired, the location is triangulated, the nearest police officer is alerted and has the ability to pull live video stream from a surveillance camera in the location, if its an active crime scene the police officer can coordinate launching a drone to get an aerial view, the nearest first responder vehicles are notified and finally all signals along the route are preempted - all these steps are executed seamlessly. By minimizing or if possible eliminating the manual touch points, valuable time can be saved in emergency situations to protect the lives of victims or apprehending an offender. The objective will be to ensure a faster, well informed and coordinated response. If smart city initiatives were to be implemented in their silos, it will be a very costly system and data integration exercise to stitch together multiple point solutions to achieve a holistic outcome. If certain proprietary solutions were to be in the mix, it may not even be possible to implement this seamless process.

I've heard the term smart city in-a-box i.e. a single vendor providing all the required solutions. As fancy as it sounds, the reality is that the needs of a community are pretty wide in areas ranging from sustainability, sanitation, healthcare, education, traffic management, security, economic development etc. There is no single vendor who can meet all those needs. So is there a way to future proof smart city investments made by cities today? After all urban infrastructure is expected to have a lifespan of 20-30 year if not more. And given the active venture capital investments in the smart city space, there is no shortage of start up's. You definitely don't want a community's critical infrastructure weaved into solutions from vendors without a viable long-term business model.

Each city's character, challenges and needs are unique. So while there is no one-size-fits-all response, certain basic steps can help avoid an expensive future systems integration exercise or a rip & replace exercise. The starting point will be to define what smart means for a community. Inputs from multiple stakeholders including the citizens with participation from a wide cross section of the society will be required, to ensure a holistic vision & strategy is crafted that is representative of the unique needs of a community. A champion for the smart city initiative with credibility across multiple department stakeholders will need to ensure they are aligned to the common vision. Finally the required solutions should be rolled-out incrementally on an open standards based platform foundation.

Successful smart city initiatives take a citizen centric approach with technology as an enabler. A combination of active stakeholder participation, working through the organizational silos, and taking a platform centric approach can ensure future proofing of smart city investments by cities.