On Tuesday June 26th at the Enterprise Ireland IoT & Smart Cities Forum held in Dublin Ireland we signed a partnership agreement with the Smart Cities Council to adapt the Tr3Dent Transformation Accelerator platform to the widely adopted and highly successful Readiness Program run by the Smart Cities Council.
This brand-new implementation of Transformation Accelerator will be branded “The Smart Cities Project Activator” and made available to the industry as a key component of the Smart Cities Council’s Readiness Program. The Smart Cities Project Activator will collect, analyze and visualize data about smart city projects and decision makers. The Project Activator will be used by cities, solution providers and investors to cut the time it takes them to define their future ecosystems by 70%, gain stakeholder agreement up to 30% faster, develop early prioritization and consensus on smart city projects, accelerate the scoping of those projects. and ultimately, speed up the delivery of benefits to city residents.
The Smart Cities Project Activator will enable a Readiness Program already proven to work for Smart City Council members. The program includes a collection of resources for cities tackling smart city projects, the opportunity to participate in a challenge, local readiness workshops, a defined readiness road map, project scoping templates, assistance with financing and access to skilled readiness ambassadors.
The readiness resources provided by the Smart City Council are accessed by more than 5,000 users each month. Of the 300 US cities with a population greater than 100,000, 92 have engaged in a readiness challenge and during 2017 more than 60 readiness workshops were undertaken in metro areas with a total of more than 200 million residents.
The Smart City Council also publishes a Readiness Guide which is available to anyone who complete a free registration to join the council.
The Smart Cities Project Activator will be designed to do the following:
- Provide a single source of truth for every project
- Collect and store project assets in a single secure location
- Facilitate collaboration among stakeholders including city officials and employees, solution providers, ecosystem partners and investors
- Integrate Smart City Council approved industry standards and resources
- Improve visibility into project(s) status and progress
- Present multiple projects in a dashboard view
- Visualize complex digital ecosystems required to support Smart City initiatives
- Track progress for Readiness Challenges
- Guide cities through the planning process using industry best practices
- Generate intuitive and easy to read reporting and materials for presentations and analysis
Currently, cities struggle to organize themselves and plan any sort of Smart City initiative or project. Many of them face an overload of bureaucracy and siloed processes, antiquated information resources and disparate data, not to mention politically driven or dated approaches to sourcing solutions and a reliance on multi-lateral funding sources which increases the complexity of decision-making and slows progress further.
For most cities, their current approach to project planning and organization might look something like what’s pictured below.
The goal of the Smart Cities Project Activator is to provide cities with a guided approach to planning, scoping, sourcing and financing their projects with the objective of helping them dramatically reduce their timelines, improve their outcomes, and ultimately, deliver benefits to residents better, faster, cheaper.
The Smart Cities Project Activator architecture looks more like what is pictured below with the business plan and ecosystem at the center, supported by industry standards and best practices, and all stakeholders involved in planning, designing and collaborating, thus achieved better results and greater buy-in.
Each year, the Smart Cities Council conducts a challenge and donates coaching, workshops, products, services and more free benefits to five communities in North America. The goal for the 2019 challenge is to facilitate the application process and manage the challenge components through The Smart Cities Project Activator. Below is a mock-up of what the screens might look like that would be used to collect data from the applicant cities. You can read more about the 2018 Readiness Challenge here.
Another function The Smart Cities Project Activator will perform is to provide city officials and investors and others who require an executive view into the status of ongoing smart city projects, a dashboard view from which they can drill down into more detail as needed.
Below is a mock-up of the type of dashboard we have in mind.
The Smart Cities Project Activator will be available in the 3rd quarter of 2018. Please let the Smart Cities Council know you are interested or contact us if you have specific questions, ideas or suggestions. To learn more about the Smart Cities Council please visit https://smartcitiescouncil.com/.
