Understanding The Verticals Part 5: Enhancing City Government and Revitalizing Economic Development
Let’s start the fifth part of this series by checking in with our favorite connected citizen, Charlie.
Charlie opted to live in his city because it offers him a connected lifestyle that supports a high quality of life, attractive employment, and promotes fun-packed recreation and wellness facilities. With this backdrop, Charlie conducts all his interactions with the city government online. In addition, he insists on his interactions with the city to be at anytime, from anywhere, and on any devices in a very simple engaging process with high degree of user experience.
At about 9:00pm, Charlie wanted to know what the balance of his condo’s property tax payment is. He accesses the city government open data, gets his condo’s property tax information, and opted to pay online for the next two quarters. The receipt for the transaction was emailed to him. This simple and pleasant user experience allowed Charlie to avoid taking off from work to visit the city tax office.
Before Charlie called it a day, he researched online about what the city offers for new businesses interested in establishing presence in the city. He was able to register for online webinars on “Doing Business with the City,” downloaded application forms about the business campus, technology park facilities, and business incentive programs that the city offers for those planning to make the city their home.
Charlie’s interactions with the city’s government and knowledge sharing of the city’s economic development infrastructure, services and incentives; resulted in traversing seamlessly between the city government, economic development, and IoT infra (communications, connectivity, data, cloud, security, analytics) verticals. However, this week, we’re going to highlight the city government and economic development verticals.
City Government Vertical
Challenges
The intent of a smart city government can be unpacked into three major areas, namely, citizen-centric services (a.k.a. personalized e-services), open data, and city services and economic infrastructures.
A typical challenge for smart city initiative is to ensure that the initiative is citizen-centric. The smart city initiative must be driven by citizen involvement in defining what is to be addressed. In addition, having the citizen participate in providing feedback on implemented smart initiatives. The citizen-centric challenge is compounded by the expectation that the city will always strive for quality and timely delivery of services (note interoperability and compatibility as new services are introduced) to its citizen with an enhanced user experience.
A major challenge, in rendering services to the citizen, businesses, vendors, service providers, etc. is in providing access (i.e., at anytime, from anywhere, on any device) to open data while, ensuring utmost security and maintaining required user-based data privacy. The other side of the open data challenge is the improvement of operational efficiencies that will result from insights derived from real-time data collection and access to all data.
A city is always worried about how to balance investments in service and economic development infrastructures with the potential tax revenue that could keep the city’s treasury in surplus. The city needs to focus on deciding on which city infrastructure investments will promote operations efficiencies in rendering of services to the citizen; and how much to invest in the city’s economic development infrastructure. Another important aspect that should be considered is can the economic development infrastructure investments be leveraged at a regional level for economies of scale?
Solutions within the smart city government vertical
Examples of solutions in this vertical include: smart public services - eGovernment, smart traffic management, interactive broadband kiosks, environmental monitoring, smart building, and as provided in the diagram below.
Opportunities
The magnitude of U.S. government investments in IoT is stated in Govini report, “overall, the federal government spent almost USD 35 billion on IoT solutions from the fiscal year 2011 through the fiscal year 2015.”
Economy Development Vertical
Challenges
The objectives of the Economy Development vertical are to leverage the IoT technology so that the city is friendly and easy to do business in and with. The economy development vertical can provide secured IoT-based business and economy infrastructures (e.g., power grid, transportation, broadband, last-mile network infrastructure, digital business campuses, etc.). Offer business tax incentive packages, robust public and private sectors relationships (e.g., social responsibilities); provide access to skilled workforce; promote training and skills re-tooling initiatives. And lastly, leverage academic institutions for research and development (e.g., technology centers, center of excellence, etc.).
Now, the challenges experienced by cities in meeting the aforementioned economic development objectives include but not limited to:
- Incentivizing businesses to locate or relocate into the city is usually a challenge. How much investments could the city shoulder in pursuit of businesses; while, being mindful of potential tax revenue and job creation that will result from such investment.
- Does the city and/or region develop skilled resources, support incentives for housing within city limits, excellent school system, recreation and park services, and structure for social responsibility initiatives?
- Is the city also willing to invest in the economic development infrastructure such as anchor industry (e.g., tourism), business campuses (i.e., economic centers), technology parks, innovation/incubator center, city-wide broadband network, free Wi-Fi for last mile connectivity, access to transit options, power grid, and smart infrastructure security.
An IoT-based smart city economic development platform will help resolve the above mentioned challenges
Solutions within the smart economic development vertical
Examples of solutions in the smart economy development vertical are as depicted in the diagram below.
