Grab the Data, then work it out
Have you seen that amusing meme with a picture of a couple in the 1960 dining in luxury on an airplane, with an airline host serving them from a trolley overflowing with luscious foods? The couple are sitting in luxury seats with a silver service of cutlery and the lady says something “Oh darling, look at all this, imagine how luxurious air travel will be in 50 year’s time?”. As you can Guess, the next picture is one of a modern low cost airline with a tiny seat and all that is served is a coca cola and a bag of peanuts. Mildly amusing as this skit is, the parallel we can draw in our current context is that technologies also start as luxury items but someone always finds away to do the same thing for less and cut out all the noise and therefore much of the cost. We can see this time and again in examples I dig into in my book.
So as a city builder, You can ignore the hype to a certain extent and focus on the fundamentals. What are the citizens benefits? What governance and data is required? This is as true for basic, standard features like license applications, as it is for Al powered predictive traffic management. It’s been more than twenty years that I have been on LinkedIn.
Back in 2003 my then boss at Vodafone said to me “ why are you wasting your time on that?!” At the time the only answer I had was that it was an aide memoire of the people I had worked with and my network. Now of course its a major recruitment and business sales, marketing platform that no business can do without. This is another example of collecting the data because you can, without knowing the ultimate use of it. One of my favorites over time was research done in Denmark, if memory serves, to determine if phones give you cancer. The premise the researchers went for was to take phone usage data from a period of ten or more years and see if heavy usage correlated with cancer deather in the twenty or so years after. Now I think the result was that there is no coloration, hence why you have never heard of this research. However the learning here is that the telco data the researchers used was not collected for cancer research. It was collected for billing, audit and telco operational purposes. So, again, collect the data and later you’ll figure out why.
Finally a nice example of this is the Dubai BIM mandatory policy with all building permit requests. For every building permit, Dubai is collecting data that can later be used in predictive planning and other yet unknown purposes.
And so the lesson is? Simple, worry less about shrinking the budget and look to make sure you can maximise the business case with more data. As many know, to costs of smart city are born by the constructing party and the benefits accrue to the operator, which are often different entities. Hence maximise the data collection built into the project, then the operator will have more options for tripple bottom line benefits. Therefore the answer is there is no too much smart city.