IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2018 - 109

Viewpoint

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1) residents (e.g., neighborhood
councils)
2) utilities (whether or not the city
owns them)
3) colleges and universities (often a
source of ideas and help)
4) nearby cities (the best place to
find cost-sharing and joint-purchasing opportunities)
5) large employers (trust me, they
want their city to be smarter)
6) small and midsize businesses (e.g.,
the local chamber of commerce)
7) regional authorities (e.g., transit,
housing, and ports)
8) county, state, and federal governments (which will often share
costs or sometimes even help
with grants)
9) the disadvantaged (e.g., the lowincome, handicapped, elderly,
homeless, underserved neighborhoods, and so forth)
10) smart city suppliers and consultants.
What will you get when you pull
together this group? First, more and
better ideas. Second, more and better
warnings about possible objections
and pushback. Third, the knowledge
you need to future-proof your digital
infrastructure-e.g., to select standards
that can be used by all departments
and to size things correctly so they can
accommodate future projects (or, at
least, be expanded later, as needed).
Fourth, and perhaps most important, you will discover more and better opportunities to share costs and
infrastructure. For instance, some cities are now sharing citywide communications networks with their
local utilities (which typically install
them for smart meters). Likewise,
many cities and regions are now
sharing infrastructure among police,
fire, and emergency services within
the city or even across the region.
A word about the tenth and final
group, smart city suppliers. Many cities
are understandably wary of self-serving sales pitches. Yet it is the private

sector that has the deep expertise cities
need, that knows the best practices
gleaned from the thousands of smart
city projects that have gone before.
Happily, many companies are glad to
share ideas without any expectation. In
fact, the Smart Cities Council enforces
precisely that kind of vendor-neutral
collaboration at the Readiness Workshops it presents around the world.

Create the Vision
As Yogi Berra famously said, "If you
don't know where you are going,
you'll end up someplace else." Now
that the city has its advisors in place,
it is time to set long-term goals. Ideally, the city already has a long-term
plan. If so, you will simply need to
review it to see where smart technologies can help you reach those goals
more quickly, cheaply, and completely.
If not, the advisory team can spend
its first few meetings to reach consensus about key goals. Please note that I
am not advocating a massive urban
planning exercise or a multimonth
consulting engagement-simply a few
discussions about where the city
wants to end up in ten years. Does it
hope to be a quiet retirement haven?
A tourist destination? A go-go hightechnology center? What are its key
strengths and biggest challenges?
Be sure that you have also assessed
community values. Does the city seek
to upgrade underserved neighborhoods? Does it want economic growth
above all else? Does it urgently want to
go green?
Obviously, you will not find unanimous agreement in any city. But you
will find some major areas of commonality, even if controversial topics
have to be tabled for now. Once you
know where you are headed, you are
ready to determine the fastest, most
cost-efficient approach.

Build a Citywide Action Plan
I often run into smart city action
plans, but rarely into smart plans that

are truly citywide. Typically, one
department or another will plan for
something smart, without the benefit
of widespread stakeholder input. In
the analog world, this stovepipe mentality leads to streets being dug up
multiple times because departments
failed to coordinate their trenching. In
the digital world, it has equally costly
and frustrating results.
The Smart Cities Council works
with cities to help them build citywide plans, using a methodology we
have developed over the past six
years. But cities can certainly tackle
this on their own. At heart, it is simply a matter of understanding what is
possible and deciding where to start.
In this phase, you will want to
consult with your team and outside
experts to understand what is possible-what kinds of things you can
accomplish with the help of digital
technologies. One free source of ideas
is the Smart Cities Readiness Guide, a
handbook of urban transformation
that packages up the best practices
and best examples from around the
world. Likewise, the Smart Cities Council's news page has hundreds of case
studies from North America, Europe,
India, and Australia.
You will definitely want to spend
time with vendors at this stage to
learn what they have done for other
cities and what they suggest for yours.
I also urge you to study other smart
city action plans. Two of my favorites
are the Smart City Vienna Framework
and the Montreal Smart and Digital
City Action Plan (both pdfs).
You want to end up with a wish list
from every department. At this point,
you are ready to look for synergies
between departments, for places to
share infrastructure, data, and costs.
And once you know where the synergies are, you are ready to start setting
priorities. Most cities look for starter
projects with these characteristics:
xx
rapid timeline
xx
quick payback
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2018