Cities urged to avoid the ‘data trap’

For cities to reach their goals – from reducing congestion to cutting carbon emissions – a key focus should be on breaking data out of silos, says Nitin Agarwal, Worldwide Lead for Smart Cities, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

According to Agarwal, the practice of deploying smart city projects in a piecemeal fashion means that some cities are duplicating cost and effort and failing to reap the full benefits from data.

A major issue, he says, is internal fragmentation where individual departments are launching data-driven projects and tools to address specific pain points. For example, the environmental team may be focused on monitoring and improving air quality, while the public works department needs to reduce the cost and improve the ease of management of public lighting. Within the office for transportation, different teams may be working on road safety, traffic flow, and traffic signal operations.

“The problem is that these individual systems are not talking to each other,” says Agarwal. “It becomes very difficult – almost impossible – for the cities to make good use of the data in these separate siloed systems.”

Integration

This is important because often these challenges and their solutions are interlinked – consider street lighting and road safety, for example, or idling traffic and air pollution.

“The biggest benefit of combining the data is that you know what is happening in another system. You can do cross-analytics of multiple systems as well as prescriptive and predictive analytics,” says Agarwal.

City income is another example – local governments need to ensure they are collecting relevant taxes to invest in resident services.

If construction permitting systems talked to property tax systems, cities could better project income and potentially automate collection processes and reminders.

“Siloed environments can’t make use of each other’s strengths,” comments Agarwal.

There are technical challenges too as often cities are investing in solutions – from sensors to cameras – that don’t allow data to be shared outside the proprietary system.

“Cities are getting into a trap,” says Agarwal. “They can’t integrate the data and when the contract is over, they can’t download the historical data or it is prohibitively expensive.”

A better way ahead

There are some key steps cities can take to improve this situation.

Agarwal advises creating a central platform or ‘data hub’ which aggregates data from point solutions. Such a hub provides the ability to monitor, manage and control the data all in one place and to run advanced analytics.

Selecting the right partners and defining contractual terms is essential to ensure data can be shared to the platform.

As a foundational step, Agarwal urges cities to create a documented strategy that defines goals and priorities and helps to align the organisation. He cites the example of the 100 cities participating in the EU Mission for climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030.

“Cities should look at a comprehensive landscape and not the siloed landscape, and they should spend some time planning what their priorities are and how they want to implement them, while ensuring that they are creating a common digital framework,” he says.

HPE offers workshops and frameworks to help cities create a roadmap and get the most from their data.