Commentary: CTO Offers Tips to Vendors on Smart City Ambitions

There is a problem in the smart cities market that has been brewing for some time. Vendors have controlled the smart city vision. But public sector hasn’t bought in, and the result has been low adoption. Here’s how we can fix that.

I recently had the pleasure to participate in a panel at Plug & Play Smart Cities Innovation Day in Sunnyvale. Among other things, we discussed strategies for startups in the burgeoning smart cities space. My feedback was straightforward enough: Focus on one thing, do it well, and help the public sector be better without introducing more problems. I’d like to elaborate on this advice in a larger discussion about the smart cities market, tech vendors, and public-sector organizations.

Tech vendors and public sector IT leaders, it turns out, have a lot in common. We both stay ahead of technology trends; make investment decisions based on the needs and feedback of our customers/user-base; and we share a common underlying goal: driving adoption of technology. To achieve this, we each set broad, sweeping technology-focused visions.

However, this last item has become problematic. In practice, public sector organizations and tech vendors often have vastly different visions for what smart cities should actually look and feel like and what they should do. This can create tensions that result in failing to achieve our shared goal of driving adoption.

Here are some observations: Tech vendors often lead their smart city visions with imagery of high-tech, ultra-connectivity. Sensors are everywhere, from the roads to tops of the poles, transmitting massive amounts of data seamlessly to central datastores in the cloud where human beings, aided by AI and ML algorithms, analyze it and find insights that vastly enhance public service efficiency and productivity. All of this happening, of course, in a frictionless user experience for the public, who can engage with public services as easily as they do with Amazon Prime.

While this sounds appealing, it vastly differs from the lived experience of public-sector leaders. Cities deal with everything from mundane issues like trimming trees to intractable, persistent social problems such as poverty, homelessness, growing inequality, crime, and development, often sitting in the middle of the inevitable march of change versus the comforting feeling of familiarity and stability. This is without mentioning tightening budgets and funding and fixing potholes and debating local taxes. In this context, the slick wizardry of sensors and data are abstract and come across as detached from the real world.

However, there is an easy way to resolve this disconnect. Tech vendors should stop creating, designing, and marketing their own smart city visions. Just stop. Instead, they should collaborate with public sector agencies and understand what they truly need and then help them to develop powerful technology and smart city visions of their own, utilizing technology to achieve those goals.

This commentary is in no way intended to be confrontational or adversarial toward tech vendors. To the contrary, the public sector needs tech vendors (and we actually like them, too). The public sector typically does not specialize in commercializing new apps and solutions, so it depends on tech vendors to develop disruptive new products and ideas. The public sector, in turn, applies new technology to enhance and improve the services they deliver. In other words, the public sector can focus on service innovation while tech vendors can focus on product innovation — and this can create symmetry.

Smart city technology matters. But the vision undergirding it (and the marketing and selling of that vision) should reflect the actual experience of government organizations, not an unrealistic ideal of what it could be that abstracts away all of the true problems. By bringing our visions of the smart city movement into alignment, we can work together to drive adoption.