SMART CITIES
The Smart City: why the silo mindset will limit its full potential By Jens Strinsjรถ, Axis Communications, Northern Europe The smart city offers significant benefits. These urban constructs are capable of reducing waste, driving efficiencies, optimising resources and increasing citizen engagement. Such benefits are reflected in the $189 billion that is anticipated to be spent on smart city initiatives globally by 20231. Public safety remains a priority area and the use cases most likely to see the money will include surveillance systems, intelligent traffic management systems and smart grids2. Smart cities offer both the business and public sectors the opportunity to embed improvements that can not only transform citizen engagement but also reduce top line spend. However, for the vision of the smart city to be fully realised there are challenges that must be overcome. While smart technology, at its core, enables the collection and analysis of data to create actionable and automated events which streamline operations, its effectiveness can be
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limited by the silo mindset. To deliver at scale, interoperability is key. Not just in terms of the technology, but the entire smart city vision. Change behaviours and break the silo Too often, city leaders think of smart city initiatives as individual strategies, for example, smart parking, smart security, smart traffic. Each area is treated as a standalone project rather than part of a comprehensive whole. The result is that the solutions, while smart and capable, are being implemented as silos and therefore limited to a narrow focus. The smart city vision cannot be realised by utilising technologies in isolation, with no thought given to how they might relate to, or work with, one another to achieve a common goal. Success in smart cities is dependent on maintaining the balance between the technology, the level of integration, the
data collected, and how this data can be leveraged to deliver the right intelligence. Smart cities must move away from the traditional operating model that involves silos and departments only focusing on one area of operation. Instead, collaboration between teams and systems is critical to the development of the fully scalable and smart city, where data can be shared horizontally for the benefit of multiple teams. Making informed decisions on technology investment The smart city cannot achieve its potential without a clear and holistic strategy that takes into account multiple requirements and determines how technologies can be used to deliver the required outcome; a centralised smart city mandate that feeds into every initiative and investment. This will involve siloed teams collaborating and sharing their learnings so that data and analysis from integrated cloud-based
