Watch:
The report ‘Smart Cities: A Gateway to Digital Life’, published by Booz Allen Hamilton, calls for the standardization of a ‘smartness’ barometer against which services and initiatives launched by the government and private sector can be measured and evaluated.
This standard will serve as a guide to city officials to effectively and consistently gauge where their cities are on the “Smartness’ scale and adjust their enabling service transformation strategies accordingly.
The report proposes four smart criteria to evaluate the smart city services:
- Degree 1’”Connected
- Degree 2’”Integrated
- Degree 3’”Personalized
- Degree 4’”Predictive
The report adds that the transformation of a city service into a “Smart’ service requires five imperatives:
- Smart Interfaces
- Smart Applications
- Smart Analytics
- Smart Infrastructure
- Smart Security
The report assembles the essential elements of a successful Smart City into four broad dimensions: empowered citizens, smart services, next-generation infrastructure, and a cohesive enabling environment. Moreover, it proposed a ten-step roadmap for a successful implementation of a Smart City strategy:
- Build a solid business case
- Plan holistically, for the long term
- Design robust foundational enablers
- Explore innovative funding mechanisms
- Enable and Promote open data
- Design citizen-centric strategies’”and refresh them when needed.
- Foster intergovernmental collaboration
- Think big and start small, with pilots that expand
- Build the right ecosystem of partners
- Design infrastructure that’ s robust, scalable,
and secure