SOLVING TOMORROW’S PROBLEMS WITH
YESTERDAY’S SOLUTIONS WILL NOT WORK
Conversations about making cities “connected” or “smarter” have
been happening for over a decade now, and we have made reasonable
progress. These smart city implementations
have largely been about optimizing city
infrastructures and processes. At Dell Technologies,
we believe the new direction is
building “digital cities”—in which digital and
data are at the core of how cities operate—
to make them intelligent, inclusive, efficient,
entrepreneurial, secure, and sustainable.
By 2020, a city of 1 million people will
generate 200 million gigabytes of data per
day. To extract value from that data, cities
will need to evolve from building siloed intelligent
systems to scaling up into an intelligent
“system of systems.” This more holistic
view of the city’s transformation leverages
cross-departmental data, interoperability,
and analytics to drive more effective and
efficient outcomes.
Cities across the world are not the same;
there is no singular winning approach to
becoming a digital city. However, in our
many engagements with local governments, we have gained a deep
understanding of common challenges cities are facing, among them:
Speed to execution is slow, often taking two to three years; data silos
are a significant drag on innovation; and stakeholders lack clarity
about the desired outcome and flexibility about the technology used
to get there.
“ By 2020, a city of 1 million
people will generate 200
million gigabytes of data
per day. To extract value
from that data, cities
will need to evolve from
building siloed intelligent
systems to scaling up into
an intelligent ‘system of
systems.’”
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