THE CHALLENGE
The Spectrum team supporting the St. Petersburg proof of concept project eagerly jumped in ready to provide a sophisticated alerting system incorporating geo-fencing, beautifully lit signs that flashed as pedestrians crossed the street thus alerting drivers to slow down. Our solution also included cameras that could capture details regarding accidents and happenings in the intersection and environmental sensors capturing air quality indicators.
On the surface, this solution sounded like the right approach for addressing our original goal of enhancing public safety. However, we quickly discovered that there were city and state regulations that prevent blinking signs at this specific intersection unless the flashes were continuous and not driven off of a specific action. As a result, the team had to reassess the problem and evaluated new potential solutions and potential options to address the city’s use cases.
It is here that we learned the importance of “loving the problem, not the solution.” The team immediately embraced a new way of thinking. The philosophy of loving the problem is a key component to any Smart City planning exercise. It is here that the team had the opportunity to engage with the end users, the key-stakeholders, and the engineers to break through the surface symptoms and get to the root cause of the true problem.
The Solution
The team quickly regrouped around this strategy after determining that more work needed to be done to better understand the true needs, the regulations in place by the city and state, and, most importantly, to gain a more insightful view of what was happening at the designated intersection. With this in mind, the team decided to take a more pragmatic approach—getting more familiar with the environment surrounding the intersection and the behaviors of the pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, students, and even the environmental changes occurring in the area. While we could not use the flashing signs, we were still able to utilize the cameras and computing system that we were planning to use with the original solution. This time, we could use the equipment to begin collecting data.
As many can attest and as the industry is showing, data is the building block to any legitimate solution. Data provides the context that allows developers of smart city solutions to create the syntax which, when combined, tells the right story of the real problem. The right story is critical to building the right solution.
Beyond the right story is the right mix of resources. The importance of engaging the right voices to help interpret the story is also critical to creating an impactful solution. This begins by identifying stakeholders and understanding their relationship to the problem. By creating a journey roadmap with the stakeholder, we can better understand that relationship, help to surface pain points, and impact and give perspective to the problem broader than just that of the immediate team developing the solution.
As we embrace our new approach, we are quickly discovering just how valuable it is. This approach has sparked creative thinking in our stakeholders by opening up new opportunities to explore and capture and even combine data that was previously unobtainable. Furthermore, with data coming in from different collection points—and the influence of the different voices and their unique perspectives on the problems we are solving for—we are positioned to combine data points in exciting new ways to generate equations (a.k.a. derived data) that help us develop the right solution for the right problem.
SPEAK WITH A SPECTRUM SMART CITIES EXPERT
