Opinion – Claudio Bernardes: The journey towards the smart city

Cities are facing major challenges in modern urban life, and making them “smarter” can be an important aid in carrying out this arduous and difficult task.

By storing and processing data and information, and making use of technological advances, smart cities will be better prepared to face issues such as health, mobility, environmental improvement, safety, and even control of urban heat generation.

The installation and use of sensors, public recording of this information, and processing models are just beginning to be explored. ‘Big data’ and smart city analytics are coming, and we may be on the cusp of a major transformation in urban areas.

However, there seems to be a general lack of understanding about how municipalities can embark in an organized and efficient way on a journey towards the smart city, through a standardized methodology that facilitates the planning and execution of the necessary transformations.

In order to help cities on this journey, the IMD (International Institute for Management Development) based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Swisscom, a large Swiss telecommunications company, published a report in which six steps are presented to make a smart city.

The first step is to establish, considering the specific characteristics and conditions of each municipality, what it means to be a smart city for that municipality. This is an extremely important initial definition, as it will determine the objectives to be achieved.

Therefore, the second step is to clearly define the objectives that will lead the city to an intelligent operation. The objectives of the Smart City can be identified by looking at municipal development strategies, challenges, problems and needs of the city, without neglecting to consider the experiences of citizens.

Next, it is necessary to define the group of projects necessary to achieve each objective. This can be done through in-depth research on how you can reach them. For example, if the objective is to “reduce the total annual traffic congestion time” by a certain number of hours, the city would have to analyze what the causes of traffic congestion are and how they can be mitigated or resolved. Identifying “Smart City” projects that can reduce traffic congestion would be the end result.

Another important stage is the evaluation of the probability of success in the implementation of each project, identifying the success factors for this endeavor.

For this assessment, the authors propose the analysis of seven success factors that involve the functioning and operation of cities: technology and infrastructure, business environment, political environment, legislation, organizational and governance structure, available talent, and cultural factors.

Each project must be evaluated according to the success factors, analyzing how each one of them influences the success in the implementation of each project. The aggregated results will give the municipality an indication of the probabilities of success.

Once these steps have been carried out, the need arises to define the impacts of each project on the city, whether positive or negative. Impact assessment is a two-step process: prioritization of objectives, and evaluation of each project, with calculation of its impact. This will allow the total impact caused by the implementation of all projects to be determined

Finally, the selection of the most promising projects must be made. This can be done using a matrix that jointly considers the probabilities of success and the assessment of the impacts of each project, thus serving as a decision-making tool on which projects to prioritize, that is, those with the greatest chance of success and that result in more positive impacts for the city.

These guidelines can be important for state governments to find the best ways to help municipalities in this journey, and in this way we can have as many cities as possible engaged in efficient transformation processes, to become smart cities, in an organized and gradual.