How to build smart cities via Minimum Viable City APAC CIO Outlook - Special Edition on IoT September 2017

1. IoT Special
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Rajesh C. Subramaniam,
CEO & Founder
September 201744
T
hink “Lean Methodology”–Build, Measure,
and Learn. I think that’s how we should build
Smart Cities. We can no longer take the risks
of building projects fast and turn them into
“white elephants”. Most of the times, smart
cities deployment failed - though we planned well, we
failed in execution. Failed in getting the citizens to use
the facilities. Failed in maintaining and sustaining the
business model.
The maturity of acceptance of city dwellers is also
an essential element. I don’t think we can just replicate
the success of one Smart City in one country to another
country without proper understanding the priorities
of the citizens due to the ethnicity and maturity of the
city inhabitants.
To avoid such issues, let’s use the “lean methodology”
in developing Smart Cities. The key element is the MVP
(Minimum Viable Product), or in this case, we might call
it “Minimum Viable City.” Here are the steps:
• Develop a hypothesis by getting citizens inputs. Provide
the citizen with engagement tools that allow them to
engage with the government or city authorities
• Collect the data and analyse the citizen’s priorities
• Build the “Minimum Viable City” Smart Applications
using physical sensors
• Measure the impact and usefulness
• Learn from the citizens whether their pain points are
adequately addressed. Iterate the process again
• Scale up the deployment
But, what’s the best tools to get citizen’s inputs? Many
citizen engagement mobile apps (example–identifying
pothole, drainage, faulty traffic light, illegal parking, etc.)
that can geo-tag the location of the issues failed simply
because it’s unable to sustain the popularity, usage,
and continuous enhancement. Why? Below are tips for
the city authorities to consider avoiding and repeating
these failures:
CXO Insights
BY MAZLAN ABBAS, CEO, FAVORIOT
How to Build Smart Cities Via
Minimum Viable City
HANDLING CONTINUOUS
DEVELOPMENT AND FUTURE
ENHANCEMENT OF THE BACKEND
SYSTEM REQUIRES SUSTAINABLE
IT SUPPORT RESOURCES
Mazlan Abbas
September 201745
Buy-in from Both Segments i.e. Officials and
Citizens
It requires the active participation of both parties.
It’s like the “chicken or egg” question. Who starts
first? Residents felt that their
complaints would fall
on deaf ears of the local
councils. The local au-
thorities felt that
the citizens need
to channel their
grouses to a prop-
er channel; not
letting their an-
ger out on social
media posts which
tend to become viral.
Publicity
If you ask 100 or 1000
people on the streets whether
they have heard about such
application, we can almost guarantee that none
have heard that. It’s also the fault of local councils,
who only use their official website portal to announce or
publicize the citizen engagement mobile app. There’s no
continuous effort in educating the public.
Finding the Concerned Citizens
What are the types of individuals concerned about the
cleanliness or the safety of the surrounding? Sometimes,
they prefer to complain but not act upon when given the
opportunity to participate. The selfishness of the citizens
sometimes hinders such services since people are only
concerned about themselves and their homes rather than
the whole community or their city.
Gamification if Necessary
People want an incentive to participate in crowdsourcing
initiative—either get themselves paid monetarily or
through prizes. The other way is to gamify the app in
such a way that gives some form of status within the
community app.
Pressure Groups
No administrators of the cities would want to handle
hundreds or thousands of complaints each day throughout
the year. But if they did not manage and close the
complaints, how could they solve all the problems which
are already in the queue? Sometimes, city authorities need
a little push or “pressure” from the people.
Social Media Channels
The most popular communication channel
used by local councils are phone, fax and
e-mail. But technology has rapidly changed
the landscape, thus, allowing the citizens
to communicate on their
favorite social media
channels.
In-house vs. Outsource
There are a lot of similar
citizen engagement mobile
apps in the market. But
most of them forget that
the backend system
that handles the reports
are not visible to them.
Nearly all local council IT
departments are not set up as
a product development house.
The budget given to them are
only enough to operate, manage,
and maintain the ITsystem but not enough
for innovation and application development.
Product Roadmap
Handling the continuous development and future
enhancement of the backend system requires the sustainable
IT support resources. New technology emerges and thus, it
must quickly be adapted with the current process workflow.
Smart CityVision
Citizen engagement is only one of the single components
in a Smart City. They are many applications, which
require integration to a smart city platform; thus, it cannot
be developed in silo manner. A real Smart City needs an
integrated platform that collects and aggregates various
sources of data (structured or unstructured) to discover the
insights of the city and make cities a better and sustainable
place to live.
It’s NOT an IT Job!
Of course, any IT company can develop the mobile app.
However, IoT requires different skills that encompass
embedded programming, understanding different
communications protocols, cloud services, and big
data analytics.
Building Smart Cities using IoT is not easy as it seems.
We must build the right business models and ensure the
investments are justified to address the real pain-points of
the citizens.