Smart Cities Solutions, Spectrum
The days of a city government executing on its own smart city projects are long gone. With the trend towards consumerization, citizens expect to be informed, and in some cases consulted, regarding ongoing city projects. To be successful, true smart city development can only be achieved by building an ecosystem consisting of a broad range of stakeholders who orchestrate and share data.
Gartner Key Findings
- "Residents want to be informed and consulted about the pandemic's impact on their communities, and their cities' responses to it. But they also want to be heard on public safety, parks and playgrounds and other amenities, public transit and parking, and a myriad of other issues."
- “CIOs need to move beyond thinking in terms of smart city projects to engage an all-encompassing range of stakeholders in the development of true urban ecosystems.”
- “Smart city government CIOs urgently need to collaborate with all the stakeholders in the urban ecosystem, and — even more importantly — enable those stakeholders to collaborate with one another in an open, transparent, trusted manner."
- "Develop data exchange mechanisms that connect stakeholders with the high-value information they need."
What This Means for City Leaders
One of the first steps for city leaders to take on their smart city journey is to create a permanent team that spans multiple stakeholders, including residents, local businesses, local government agencies and technology partners. With a dedicated team in place, these various stakeholders can work together to prioritize which smart city project will have the most impact on their community. By focusing on a single project, city leaders are more likely to find success rather than trying to boil the ocean.
Per Gartner, “The first steps toward building a truly strategic plan is for CIOs and their teams to build projects with a scalable focus on outcomes in both operational efficiency and citizen impact.” Part of that strategic plan also needs to consider data and how it’ll be shared between stakeholders. According to Gartner, “Data is, of course, at the heart of any smart city project, and enabling the appropriate flow of information is at the heart of the smart city CIO’s role. All the stakeholders we’ve been talking about — stakeholders who are competing, conflicting or collaborating, and sometimes doing all at once — need access to relevant, actionable, contextualized data, and they need it fast, accurate and in real time.”
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Gartner Report: From Smart City to Intelligent Urban Ecosystem —Unlocking Data Value Is the Key to Cities’ Industrial Partnerships, Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Bill Finnerty, 29 October 2020.
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