ITs About Making Lives Smarter

As technologies, markets and social conventions have evolved over the years, it is critical to calibrate new approaches for stimulating innovation, enriching lives, building smarter cities, and making the world better.

Lets consider cities, home to more than half the worlds population. They can be seen as complex networks of components: citizens, businesses, transport, communications, water, energy, city services and other systems. Citizens and businesses rely on infrastructure systems for their activities and well-being.

Improvementsor disruptionsin transportation, communications and utility systems can have dramatic impact on the daily activities of citizens and businesses. City services integrate and coordinate the activities taking place in the other components. Understanding how cities improve and change through the lens of these elements offers cities new perspectives on the progress they are making toward achieving strategies and objectives.

Cities continue to develop and refine their economic and social goals and the strategies to achieve them. The performance of core systems of todays cities is fundamental to social and economic progress. A new generation of solutions that capitalizes on instrumented, interconnected and intelligent capabilities can be applied against virtually any of a citys core systems. Faced with major challenges, these systems can be improved and optimized through the application of smart IT solutions.

Instrumentation enables cities to gather more high-quality data in a timely fashion than ever before. For example, utility meters and sensors that monitor the capacity of the power generation network can be used to continually gather data on supply and demand of electricity. The pervasiveness and low cost of existing devices and sensors, like gas, electricity and water meters, offer the ability to measure, sense and understand the exact condition of virtually anything. Add to that new sensors and devices that offer further data gathering possibilities, such as RFID tags. These existing and new sensors and devices can now be embedded across key city systems as a first step in addressing and solving many of the challenges cities face, ranging from improving library services to maintaining sewerage systems.

Besides, interconnection creates links among data, systems and people in ways not previously possible. For example, billions of people will use the internet. Soon, the world will be populated by more than a trillion connected and intelligent things, such as cars, appliances, cameras, roadways and pipelines, collectively creating an internet of things. These interconnections enable communication and coordination among objects, people and systems across the city framework, opening up new ways to gather and share information.

Also, intelligence in the form of new kinds of computing models and new algorithmsenables cities to generate predictive insights for informed decision making and action. Combined with advanced analytics and ever-increasing storage and computing power, these new models can turn the mountains of data generated into intelligence to create insight as a basis for action. For example, statistical models with time-dependent data feeds to predict traffic flows can be used to adjust and optimize
congestion pricing according to need.

Further, they can help illuminate the interactions among different systems, giving leaders better understanding of whats happening in their cities and allowing for more effective action as a result.

To take advantage of how smarter city approaches can help advance those strategies, city authorities and stakeholders need to understand how their city is performing today and where progress is being achieved in infusing intelligence into their systems. This calls for a systematic assessment of a citys position in relation to its peers. Such an assessment can identify and help communicate emerging strengths and weaknesses. Indeed it can highlight where real progress is occurring and inform a plan for future improvements, and help cities prioritize actions.

Also the cities will have to continually be innovating. However, that progress can only come if successes also occur simultaneously on all 4 fronts: political, economic, social and technological, not just along 1 dimension. National and regional governments have a central, indeed crucial, role to play in leading their citizens and institutions through economic development.

The only way to achieve this and thrive in todays increasingly challenging environment is by innovatinginnovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, and innovating in business models. Indeed, today, what matters most is the value that arises from a creation and not just technology for its sake. There is an intense need to think collaboratively and in a multifaceted manner. By far, the key precondition for real change now exists: there is a growing hunger for fundamentally new approaches. For sure, the world will continue to become smaller, flatter and smarter. We are moving into the age of the globally integrated and intelligent economy, society and planet. And, the future holds enormous promise.