S
MART
C
ITIES
:
N
OT A DISTANT DREAM ANY MORE
L
EVERAGE
B
IG
D
ATA
&
A
NALYTICS TO MITIGATE CHALLENGES
Contents
SMART CITIES: NOT A DISTANT DREAM ANY MORE
... I
LEVERAGE BIG DATA & ANALYTICS TO MITIGATE CHALLENGES
... I
1.
TITLE OF THE PAPER
... 1
2.
THEME
... 1
3.
KEYWORDS
... 1
4.
ABSTRACT
... 1
5.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
... 2
6.
INTRODUCTION TO SMART CITIES
... 2
7.
WHY SMART CITIES ARE IMPORTANT?
... 3
7.1
People & Environment
... 6
7.2
Processes
... 6
7.3
Technology
... 6
7.4
Government
... 6
8.
KEY CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING SMART CITY PROJECTS
... 7
8.1
Digitization
... 9
8.2
Mobility
... 10
8.3
Collaboration
... 11
8.4
Project Management
... 12
8.5
Safety, Security & Infrastructure
... 12
8.6
Process expertise & Analytics
... 13
9.
SMART CITY PROJECTS - METHODOLOGY & APPROACH
... 14
10.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
... 14
11.
QUANTIFIED BENEFITS TO BUSINESS
... 14
12.
CONCLUSION
... 15
1 | P a g e
1. TITLE OF THE PAPER
Smart Cities: Not a distant dream any more. Identify, Analyze & Mitigate show stoppers while implementing Smart City projects
2. THEME
Strategic & Innovative Practices Portfolio, Programs & Project
3. KEYWORDS
Smart cities, Big Data, Analytics, Utilities, Smart grid, Smart metering, SMAC
4. ABSTRACT
India is gearing towards implementing 100 Smart cities and in fact we will be witnessing first ever smart city by 2020. The idea is very noble & ambitious and certainly drawing world attention on to us. To live up to the credibility earned launching "Mangalyaan" and further scaling to new heights, we should retrospect every step in implementing smart cities.
Smart city implementation demands an excellent coherence and coordination among different entities like IT, Civil, Utilities, Telecom, Security, Municipal, Surveillance, Logistics & finally the team. Size of each entity in itself is humongous. So, unless a thorough diligence applied in every facet of these units, success cannot be achieved.
I would like to share my experience implementing projects of this size, nature and dimensions. Discuss upon project approach, scheduling, control. Finally, I would like to recommend an approach to identify risks, quantification criteria, mitigation strategies and aversion mechanisms.
2 | P a g e
5. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Topic Page #
Introduction to Smart city projects 4
Why smart cities are important? 5
Key challenges in implementing smart cities 8
Methodology & approach 14
Critical success factors 14
Quantified Benefits to Business 14
Lessons learnt 14
Conclusion 15
References 15
6. INTRODUCTION TO SMART CITIES
Smart city is the Buzz word now. Almost every day, somewhere or other, we come across various initiatives being taken across the nation on smart cities and related projects. Needless to mention, these projects are going to be backbone of India’s growth and propel India into the orbit of most developed countries. Global economic majors evinced keen interest to sponsor some of these smart cities and one can see a healthy competition between the cities in terms of how “Smart” they are aspiring to be.
3 | P a g e
In order to execute these projects successfully and ensure that they follow schedules and adhere to budgets, it is pertinent to note the key role played by the Project and PMO to guide the progress of these cities amidst the multifold challenges, different but substantive. Micro level planning with logical prioritization of the projects, zero based budgeting and management by objectives, will go a long way in monitoring progress and measuring success.
The systemic planning, also, shall be aligned to the state policies and priorities to ensure that the aspirations of the political leadership and the people go hand in hand, with development. The scope of this paper is to identify potential risks and pitfalls, their root causes and steps to manage such risks.
7. WHY SMART CITIES ARE IMPORTANT?
India is known for its planned urbanization - centuries old. Cities existed as religious centers, trading and manufacturing hubs. However, with exploding population and lack of grand systemic vision, along with foreign rule for several centuries, development happened, in bits and pieces, often unconnected and misaligned with local requirements and environmental concerns. Consequently, urbanization happened in silos with disconnect between economic & educational needs on one hand and social and environmental impact considerations on the other. SMART CITY is a timely focused pan-Indian initiative to tap the local resources effectively, integrating with the needs of local citizens. The state can play a role, more as a facilitator in identification of short term and long term projects to be undertaken, and select appropriate technologies, with people’s participation, so as to achieve and sustain planned growth measured by certain pre-defined indicators of “Smartness”, even as this concept evolves with time.
Definition of Smart city as quoted in Wikipedia
“Smart city uses digital technologies or information and communication technologies to enhance quality and performance of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption, and to engage more effectively
4 | P a g e
and actively with its citizens. Sectors that have been developing smart city technology include government services, transport and traffic management, energy, health care, water and waste. Smart city applications are developed with the goal of improving the management of urban flows and allowing for real time responses to challenges. A smart city may therefore be more prepared to respond to challenges than one with a simple 'transactional' relationship with its citizens. Other terms that have been used for similar concepts include ‘cyberville, ‘digital city’’, ‘electronic communities’, ‘flexicity’, ‘information city’, 'intelligent city', ‘knowledge-based city, 'MESH city', ‘telecity, ‘teletopia’’, 'Ubiquitous city', ‘wired city’”
Non-linear growth in technologies like Big Data, Cloud computing and Analytics enabled processing power of billions of data thus enabling to integrate among multiple sections of the government.
Figure 1: Principle Components of Smart City
5 | P a g e
People : mindset change & trust in abilities to excel
Process: revamping of existing processes for seamlessly integrated
Technology: Application of state of the art technologies like cloud computing & analytics
The systems diagram in Fig 2 depicts the interplay of these three areas, facilitated and moderated by government, channelizing resources, meeting aspirations & monitoring others.
1. People & environment 2. Processes
3. Technologies 4. Government
Figure 2: Building Blocks of Smart City
People & Environment
Processes
Government
Technology
6 | P a g e
7.1 People & Environment
People are both participants & recipients of development that happens in smart cities. As participants, they contribute in the form of accurate data reporting & intelligent decision making. The benefits as an outcome include agility in responding to societal needs, safer and cleaner environment. People enjoy as well as drive the smart governance, smart living & rising economy. Smart and fast commutation , Digitization of economy, Effective governance , Technology upgradation, New technology adoption are some of the building blocks for effective benefits to be passed on to people.
Environment is another beneficiary as it gets nurtured and steps to be taken to avoid adverse effect on it in achieving smart city vision.
7.2
ProcessesVarious existing processes and underlying functions to be detailed and connected, logically & seamlessly, which helps to identify redundancies in system, and ensures that services are available to people swiftly at lower cost. These processes of service delivery by the state or local administration to the common man forms cutting edge of smart city governance. Every process should have a logical start, logical end and should link to another process.
7.3
TechnologyState of the art technology should be adopted handling structured / unstructured data of large volumes from interconnection of multiple data sources spread across various locations. Analytic algorithms like ARIMA to be used for intelligent decision making and information dashboards including cloud computing.
7.4
GovernmentAll said and done, finally it’s in the hands of government to make or break the smart city initiative. Committed and visionary leadership with transparencies in functioning will go along with in government
7 | P a g e
transitioning itself from the role of provider to that of facilitator of citizen series. Utmost dedication, commitment and willing to change is very much required. Organization Change Management (OCM) plays vital role in bringing fresh perspective and buy-in from government bodies.
8. KEY CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING SMART CITY PROJECTS
The challenges in smart city projects are on different scale and complexity, when compared to conventional projects in similar space. These projects are a combination of Business Process Reengineering with deep dive into process refinement, supported by best in class Infrastructure, end to end integration of various systems involved all running on cloud and providing insights through cross functional & cross disciplinary analytics. The following table reflects a list of key challenges and key stakeholders who can help in managing them.
Key Challenge Stakeholders
Digitization People & local government
Mobility Service & Infrastructure providers
Collaboration Voluntary associations , Monetary organizations , NGO
& Local admin
Project Management PMO Planning & Execution team
Process Expertise & Analytics Data Scientists , Domain SME & Political admin leadership
8 | P a g e
9 | P a g e
8.1 Digitization
Smart city generates lots of data, structured & unstructured, hard / soft formats. It is imperative that all stakeholders come together to identify data sources and identify their relevance, quality & volume to be handled so that fundamental requirement of digitized data is taken care of. Government plays a significant role in understanding and sponsoring digitalization, it is important to engage with them from an early stage to ensure that challenges are taken care of.
Each and every data element to be processed as part of smart city project must & should be digitized. Getting a clean digitized data is a challenge. Most of the government bodies computerized their operations however it would be helpful if a thorough analysis of their data is done for quality & consistency assessment
Digitization helps to grow from Digitized to becoming Smart to being Intelligent. Getting right data in right format from right source with right quality is an ideal scenario however in reality, data issues are perennial problem to deal with. It is important to rope in the views and active support of all stakeholders before we embark on this journey.
Steps to mitigate challenges in digitization process:
Fig 4 : Multiple sources and their degrees of maturity
data
source3
data
source1
data
source2
10 | P a g e
1. Identification of multitude of data sources that impact these projects, their periodicity, the validation, completeness and periodic updation, with a possible degree of templates and automation.
2. Given the different levels of literacy among people, along with differences in employment, it is required to understand the relatively different levels of importance and commitment people have towards such projects and develop sector specific plans.
3. Despite all out efforts to capture and leverage data, errors and inconsistencies do surface and necessary interventions to fill these gaps to be planned.
8.2 Mobility
Scalable solutions of mobility and pervasive computing in identifying incipient challenge across all verticals is part of smart city solution. Multi-fold benefits like reduced traffic congestion, shorter trip times, improved safety, less pollution etc. can be enjoyed through enhanced mobility. Pls refer to fig 5.
Mobile Strategy Mobile Apps development and maintenance Mobile apps testing Apps stores and deployment Mobile Analytics Mobile environment and management
11 | P a g e
Figure 5: Mobility & Apps Value Chain
Steps to mitigate mobility challenges and issues
1. Defining the mobile strategy such as what applications will be available to citizens on the move, their relative importance, the sequence of roll out, their testing and validation are to be well planned and documented. It is desirable to invite public discussion, so as to align the development to citizen’s needs.
2. The infrastructure also shall be planned to support or grows progressively to support the mobile applications planned in each city in a phased manner.
8.3 Collaboration
Lack of collaboration among various departments is another challenge to deal with. The peculiarity of this challenge is, unlike other issues, this challenge is invisible & non-explicit yet causes highest damage if not controlled.
Steps to mitigate challenges in collaboration
1. The best way to deal with is to increase communication (formal, informal), regular status calls, status updates, rewards & awards, constructive feedback and tactics to cut through bureaucratic road blocks.
2. Adopt tools like Documentum, SharePoint to store the project documents, inculcate and enforce check-in, check-out policies so that the sanctity would be maintained.
3. The objectives and goals set should be universally accepted and set up the accountability for each role and assign team accordingly.
12 | P a g e
8.4 Project Management
Hand pick the project team. Carefully select the skills (do not compromise), regular-training programs should be charted out, motivate the team to go extra mile.
Steps to mitigate challenges in collaboration
1. Identify the right person mapped to right role.
2. Skill set of the team should be aligned to project needs.
3. Team should be trained / hands-on in Big Data & Predictive Analytics.
4. PMO should be from experienced hands-on in technology & cloud computing.
5. Team should have in-depth knowledge of statutory standards like SEVESO, ISO, IEEE, API, ISA 95 etc. 6. Most important, is define and freeze scope, milestones and deliverables, change order team and
OCM team should be identified / employed to handle scope changes and org. change ,management.
8.5 Safety, Security & Infrastructure
Safety & Security only can win customer confidence and each city shall take active precautions in the type and nature of security they build with respect to citizen specific data.
The following steps can prevent Safety & Security breach 1. Compliance audit
2. Statutory policies
3. User training and awareness programs 4. Share the statistics with public.
Does making the city infrastructure smart translate to smart city? We do not think that this is so. There is a white space between the city resident and the city infrastructure/ services. More investment has to be made to fill this whitespace with intelligent interaction with the city and its government with the city resources. This is not another technology solution. It is our way of defining a means to enable a resident to be effective in a city.
13 | P a g e
In this presentation, we define a platform to meet the needs of people and the city services. The interactions are divided into two group’s value which are delivered through IT. They are:
1. Knowledge/ Information these can be life –long learning. Information about their environment including sickness, management of themselves, etc.
2. Intelligent Interaction, which we use technology to extend the physical capabilities the residents, It could be a more efficient way a social worker can take care of a patient, online booking of appointments.
Through consistent messaging and education, we can leverage technology to prepare residents to cope with the different needs that they will experience during their life-time. These will create strong values that could positively steer a city toward a more balance society without sacrificing economic growth. We believe that SMART cities are important in modern context. But we emphasize that a SMART city with people interacting intelligent with them should be the ultimate goals of city of the future.
8.6 Process expertise & Analytics
Issues need not be new but solution should bring in new ideas and out of box thinking. Inculcate the art of analytical thinking and awareness. Analytics plays major role in Security, City Planning, City Transport, Ambience, Life style, Spending and investments etc. Through a thorough understanding of process functions, prepare list of L1 L2 L3 processes and map process to smart city product features. Identify gaps and develop bespoke solution. Unit test / integrate test the solution.
14 | P a g e
9. SMART CITY PROJECTS - METHODOLOGY & APPROACH
Figure 6: Mobility & Apps Value Chain
Though, scope of this paper does not include detailed discussion on Methodology, however broad steps are provided in fig 6.
10. CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
1. Very strong partner tie-up
2. Leadership team with dedicated & committed vision towards excellence 3. Strong integration & Collaboration among discrete verticals
4. Out of box thinking & Approach 5. Smart people
11. QUANTIFIED BENEFITS TO BUSINESS
Referencing to Gartner reports and other reports of similar caliber, Smart city benefits are
Kick off & Scofe freeze Smart cityt framework
Design & Sign off
Smart city pilot development and fine
tune
Pilot result review, agree on enhancements , schedule , cost and team Start Smart City full phase
15 | P a g e
1. Energy efficiency improves by 30% factoring to smart buildings, predictive maintenance, smart waste management etc.
2. Improved Life style by 20 to 30% factoring to water conservation & waste water treatment, control of emissions, payments etc.
3. Logistics : vehicle tracking & parking
4. People safety and security improves by 50%
12. CONCLUSION
It is every Indians dream that India should stand next/ ahead of developed countries. We are proving ourselves in technology intensive industries like space, defense etc. We should further leverage our abilities to build smart cities to handle the ever growing migration to cities and depleting natural / man made resources. The only answer to address this problem is implementing smart cities.
This paper talks about smart city definitions, what and why they are important, and quickly moves to key perennial challenges surfacing and obstructing progress, along with remediation measures. Also, outlined the benefits of smart cites and critical success factors.
13. REFERENCES
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city
2. http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/thefunds/instruments/doc/jessica/jessica_horizontal_study_s
