Smartcon Dubai: How 'smart' is smart city?

At a time when cities are racing against one another to become ‘smarter’ by the day, a consultancy has highlighted the need for a framework to define degrees of smartness of public services in cities.

Suring a keynote speech at the Smartcon 2015 conference in Dubai, Ramez Shehadi, Executive Vice President & Managing Director, Booz Allen Hamilton (Booz Allen), called for the standardisation of a  ‘smartness’ barometer against which services and initiatives launched by the government and private sector can be measured and evaluated.

A report published by Booz Allen entitled ‘Smart Cities: A Gateway to Digital Life’ recommends organising the smart evaluation criteria as ‘connected’, ‘integrated’, ‘personalised’ and ‘predictive’, plotting a service’s level of excellence.

The framework will inform service transformation strategies and cultivate a recognised measure of what it means to be truly smart.

Enhancing the quality of life in smart cities is contingent upon a detailed understanding of constituent behaviour, says the report, which cites big data analytics as a critical tool to recognising and understanding that behaviour.

“By taking a holistic, citizen-centric approach to smart service development, city officials can realise the promise of healthier living, greater productivity and enhanced business innovation, thereby improving the overall quality of life,” said Shehadi.

“The most desirable form is a predictive smart service, which enables agencies to turn hard field intelligence into predictive insights – and anticipatory action. This is often supported by an analytics program that evaluates current road and transit patterns to predict future usage, guiding informed decisions,” he continued.

“The higher a city’s services move on the smartness barometer, the smarter the city becomes. Smarter schools, utilities, commerce, healthcare, transport, and security are just the beginning of what’s possible.”

The report also calls on global governments and ICT service providers to modernize and retrofit existing infrastructure, a move that will help facilitate volume growth of digital infrastructure that in turn supports smart services. The deployment of 21st century technology will also empower policymakers to address economic, social, and environmental challenges of urbanisation.

The report adds that the smartness of a service will need to cover other imperatives such as the maintenance of intuitive personalized interfaces, smarter back-end applications with open data - crucial for predictive analytics and technology infrastructure that enables convergence, all backed by high levels of security.

Other key fundamentals that can support the efficient adoption of smart services include quantifying return on investments ahead of time, a comprehensive implementation roadmap, a robust governance model, symbiotic partnerships, pilot test programs and periodic performance reviews.

Co-authored by Booz Allen’s Ramez Shehadi, Executive Vice President & Managing Director, Dr. Raymond Khoury, Executive Vice President, Danny Karam, Vice President and Jad Rahbani, Senior Associate, the report was released during the two-day smartcon 2015 event in Dubai, taking place during the United Arab Emirates’ Innovation Week. 

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