Before a community starts down the path toward becoming a Future-Ready Economy, it needs to create a roadmap that will lead it to the highest likelihood of success. But where should companies start? Dell innovation expert Glenn Wintrich has worked for years with businesses and cities, and here he is sharing his best practices on strategy to create Smart Cities.
Q. What are the top three lessons for communities that want to become smarter cities?
A. First, start with the business opportunity, not the technology. Once you’ve defined the opportunity, you can then identify the information that needs to be gathered, what applications are required, and finally, the technology architecture.
Second, and probably most important, involve the community. Just because you build something doesn’t mean citizens or government employees will use it. Engage with the community to ensure you meet its needs.
Third, look at the business models that can sustain your solution. We’ve seen cases all over the world where cities have built proof of concepts for traffic, for buildings, for water problems, but they didn’t have a sustainable business model to fund the solution once the proof of concept was over. So really understanding how to sustain and fund solutions in creative ways is equally important.
Q. Cities don’t have unlimited funds. Where are you seeing creative ways to fund future-ready projects?
A. In Europe we’re working with a group of five cities that have common challenges related to water. By sharing the software and the platform costs, these cities can potentially reduce their overall costs. They’ve increased the teaming, and they’ve come up with more innovative ideas.
Q. Where are you seeing quick wins in applying Internet of Things technologies to smart buildings?
A. One example is a 40-story office building in New York City. In that building, they have to pump water to the roof to create the gravity pressure necessary to run the building’s water system. They brought in sensors and used acoustics to measure the water flow up to the roof, but when they shut the water off, they heard the sound of water rushing back down the same pipes and running out of the building.
So in just the first few minutes of monitoring analytics, they discovered they had a water problem – and they were able to solve the problem within hours. They also used sensors to analyze when they were cooling and what water usage they had. By optimizing that usage at the beginning, middle, and end of day, they were able to save quarter of a million dollars every three months. Those are the kind of savings for which every CIO is looking.
Q. How important is coalition-building across the public and private sector for successful initiatives?
A. Public and private partnerships are key. It’s important to build an ecosystem of partners from public utilities, to citizens, to city administrators. When you bring disparate groups together you get different ideas, and you end up having very innovative, co-created solutions. Dell’s point of view is if you aren’t partnering, you aren’t successful.
Q. How important are open data and open platforms in integrating technology with physical systems?
A. When you’re using open data and open platforms, you tap into a large entrepreneurial community that can bring new applications and new software to the city – in many cases at almost no cost. Cities need technology that can be built upon, that is open, and is not going to require replacement in a few years. So that’s a huge benefit.
To find out more from Dell about future-ready economies, please visit Dell.com/futurereadyeconomies.
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