Intelligent Transport Solutions for Smart Cities and Regions: Lessons Learned
management challenges in harmonizing data
from a wide range of existing and future
sensors, many of which use proprietary
communication and reporting protocols. The
strategic challenge is to recognize that each
city will manage a growing number of
connected assets and data sources. The
start-up challenge, therefore, is to
experiment by bringing together a few data
streams into a common environment to
enable data sharing and application mash-
ups for different use cases.
S MART C ITY S TART -U P C HALLENGES
Smart city solutions touch new operating
boundaries for city managers. A few well-
defined applications, such as waste
collection or smart, street lighting, might
map onto formal, operating budgets. For the
most part, however, information gathering
and learning, innovation, technology
evaluation and trials activities do not have
an obvious home in city budgeting
frameworks 3 . Most of the time, these tend
to result in isolated efforts with pilots
contributing to more fragmentation.
Apart from the technical issues involved in
this process, smart city authorities will have
to deal with internal organizational
structures. They will also have to plan for
change
management
requirements
associated with becoming a smart city.
Funding for smart city innovation is the first
challenge and a significant barrier to
adoption. Government authorities have
recognized this challenge and have assigned
funding for innovation via programs such as
Horizon2020 (Europe), Innovate UK (UK) and
the Smart Cities Challenge (USA), for
example. Even with seed funding for
innovation, cities have to find ways to create
sca le to avoid addressing narrow solutions
and to leverage the skills of other
organizations with expertise in different and
complementary domains. In addition, there
is little consideration of the economic
sustainability of solutions and how these can
be profitable for cities and citizens.
The IoT is a relatively new market and one
that encompasses a wide range of
technologies including connectivity, remote
device management, big-data, analytics and
augmented reality to name but a few. How
should city authorities assess the relevance
of these different technologies given that
they are primarily not technology
organizations? Technology, therefore, can
overwhelm the start-up process and lead to
inaction or investment in just a sub-set of the
overall portfolio necessary to sustain
multiple smart city services. One approach
to overcome the technology challenge is to
work within a multi-party eco-system. Here,
different specialists contribute their relevant
expertise within the framework of a
common goal and model of cooperation.
A second challenge is to strike the right
balance between tactical and strategic goals.
Most cities lack a complete picture of the
assets and data sources under their
management. Creating a data inventory is a
time and resource absorbing activity.
Equally, there are non-trivial data
3 Mobile World Congress 2017: Panel discussion with representatives from Hertfordshire County Council, Oxfordshire County Council. InterDigital
and WorldSensing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjT_zY7xYlg
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June 2017