Governing ICT transformation

As we have seen, smart city means that  a city must enhance quality of life and provide benefits to the people living and working there. So the city or  metropolitan perspective is: creating the smart services that ultimately will serve their citizens, and their businesses.
Digitization – the subject of this module- is considered  as a key enabler for smart cities It involves, for example, the availability of data infrastructures, and social interaction platforms (see also module 5).

When governing the transformation process, it is important to be aware of the vendor perspective:

• Hardware vendors produce various devices. Generally, those are the data generating devices, the smart meters, the sensors, the cameras,
• Infrastructure companies. Unlike the previous type of companies, these companies have traditionally been active in the urban arena, be they urban water companies, electricity companies, transport companies, even postal services, or telecom operators. These companies also have embraced the concept of smart cities and put that concept forward because they can create, based on their infrastructures, a digital layer, and services that go with it.
• And then, there is a third type of company or vendor. They are new to the urban area. Those are the IBMs, the Ciscos of the world. They offer services to manage, integrate this data, manage this data, to analyze this data, and they also are maybe the most vocal ones in promoting the concept of ”Smart City.”

Typically, the vendors, look at consumers. They want to monetize the services they are providing, and, ultimately, they will look at the consumers of the smart services they are proposing.

The above means we must deal with the demand pull versus the technology push.

Digitalization offers plenty of opportunities for cities, but there is a little bit of technology push, especially by the vendors, to adopt these new technologies. Whereas, from the city’s perspective, this would rather be a demand view. Is this actually needed? Does it help the city to make better, more efficiently managed new services that are actually demanded?

 

Furthermore, it is important to look at different types of innovation

• Process of optimization, of incremental innovation, of improving the existing systems thanks to the digital layer. This helps, for example,  to manage the infrastructures more efficiently.
• Providing  new types of services that can be provided thanks to data layers.