6 Steps to Transform Your City Through Digital Solutions

For centuries, cities have faced common problems across a host of areas, from energy and water distribution, building and infrastructure planning, transportation, public safety and justice to recreation and culture, education, healthcare and social services, and administration.

Today there’s a growing optimism and a sense of urgency among city officials who realize that, for the first time, they can solve many of these problems at a reasonable cost by using digital technologies in areas such as the cloud, big data, mobile computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and social media.

Until a few years ago, digital options either didn’t exist or were too expensive for cities to use. Now such technologies can cost-effectively tap into enormous computational, data-storage, analytical and social capabilities that enable cities to transform their operations and infrastructures, engage their citizens and businesses, and accelerate innovation and opportunity.

Finding the right digital technologies and figuring out how to implement them is no easy task for a city leader. What should your city do to become a smarter city? Here are six steps to consider.

1) Develop a unique plan based on your specific needs. All cities share common problems, but each has a unique physical location, climate, culture, economic base, and political system.

Planners in each city—even those in the same region or next door to each other—prioritize problems based on their unique needs and citizen demands. So first, develop a plan that prioritizes the functions of your city that you want to address with digital tools.

Then embrace that plan in full view of your citizens. If you’re going to adopt a model or a solution that works someplace else, be sure to think about what you need to do to make sure it works in your unique situation.

2) Inventory your IT infrastructure and data. Cities worldwide have been investing in IT infrastructure for years.

Almost all cities everywhere have some kind of IT infrastructure in place and can use it to develop surprisingly sophisticated solutions. That could include systems ranging from employee payroll to citizen services like traffic ticket payment or license applications.

Systems like these produce data that could be useful without necessarily involving ripping and replacing existing systems.

You can gain significant value from applying data analytics to data that your city planners already have. Identifying how what you own aligns with what you prioritize lets you move forward strategically in solution choices.

3) Transparently define your long-term security, privacy and compliance needs. Before you can figure out what solutions to pursue and who your partners should be, establish requirements and policies for security, privacy and regulatory compliance.

If your city doesn’t have a legal framework for privacy—a common scenario—there are guiding questions that you can answer to establish that framework: Who owns the data that comes from citizens and the city? Where is that data going to reside, and who will have access to it? Who will use the information and how? Can citizens inspect the process to make sure their data is used appropriately?

The trusted relationship between citizens and the city is paramount, so ensuring transparent engagement with stakeholders across public and private communities is essential.

4) Optimize for interoperability. Because IT infrastructure in most cities is built over many years, the technical solutions cities adopt are heterogeneous; they often run on multiple platforms and need to support many open standards and protocols.

It’s best to prioritize interoperability from the start as you build a framework to evaluate technical solutions.

You can build solution-by-solution over a long time if you have confidence that your investments today will not limit your choices for future investments.

If you’re not building for interoperability, you’re reducing the overall value of your solution portfolio.

5) Capitalize on data analytics in the cloud. Improving any system or service requires deeply understanding how it operates. Deep understanding comes from data that can illustrate historical trends, current activities and future possibilities.

Most cities already have a vast trove of data that they’re not fully using, and there’s far more of it coming.

According to IDC’s 2014 “Digital Universe Study for EMC,” the volume of data generated by connected devices each year is expected to grow from 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 to 44 zettabytes (or 44 trillion gigabytes) in just five years, representing growth of 40 percent per year.

As city planners know, data without analysis has no value. That’s where the analytical capabilities in the cloud are helping cities today.

IoT produces large volumes of data from sensors and devices, and once that data is ingested into the cloud, you can perform pattern analysis and modeling, apply business intelligence and generate visualizations. The cloud can enable data analytics at a cost point that most cities simply cannot replicate on-premises.

If data grows at 40 percent per year, cities that manage on-premises datacenters will reach limits in capacity faster than they anticipated. But most cities will want to keep some datasets private and under their control on-premises.

A hybrid cloud model lets you maintain some assets on-premises while moving other data to the cloud to exploit the analytics capabilities there.

6) Learn from citizen-centric solutions in other cities. Microsoft engages cities around the world through Microsoft CityNext, a people-first approach to innovation that empowers government, businesses and citizens to shape the future of their regions, cities and municipalities.

To learn about best-of-breed solutions for cities, visit www.microsoft.com/en-us/citynext/stories.aspx. Here are a few worth exploring:

• The city of Helsinki
• Bornholm Regional Municipality, Denmark
• Tacoma Public Schools