Drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that city strategies need to become more agile and resilient in the face of uncertainty. Spectrum Smart Cities details below how city leaders can deploy the Internet of Things (IoT) to adapt to shifting realities and drive innovation.

Gartner Key Findings

• “The pandemic accelerates penetration of IoT in smart cities and provides new use cases, but challenges remain for scale.”
• “The use of IoT will shift from simple monitoring to prediction and simulation by combining with other technologies.”
• “IoT will enable organizations to broadly capture and maximize the full range of data collaboration between cities and ecosystems.”
• “The public-private partnership (PPP) model will be further encouraged to relieve government budgetary constraints and increase private participation in smart cities’ IoT initiatives.”

What This Means for Communities

As city leaders look to deploy more IoT devices to maximize data collection and analysis, eventually shifting from simple monitoring to prediction, they’ll need to consider the long-existent challenge of deployment at scale.

Per Gartner, “Many of the changed requirements and behaviors by the pandemic (such as touchless, safety-oriented, community resilience, etc.) will persist even when the crisis wanes. This will drive IoT deployment in smart cities but won’t change the long-existent challenges when cities look to scale up these deployments.”

By collaborating with strong partners, from neighboring cities to savvy technology companies, city leaders can promote an open approach that is strategic in nature and designed to tackle the long-term challenges when it comes to scaling projects city-wide.

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Gartner Market Trends: 5 Smart City IoT Deployment Trends to Drive Innovation Opportunities, Milly Xiang, 28 December 2020.

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