We are creating some awesome events for you. Kindly bear with us.

EXCLUSIVE – Citizens and service – Smart city strategy of The Hague

EXCLUSIVE - Citizens and service - Smart city strategy of The Hague

Brian Benjamin, Smart City Program Manager, City of The Hague, Netherlands, says he is keen on studying smart urban security project implementation when he arrives in Singapore for the SINGAPORE OPENGOV LEADERSHIP FORUM 2016, on May 12, 2016   

Being the man responsible for rolling out smart projects for the city of The Hague, Benjamin firmly believes in learning from key implementations from around the world and also makes sure that his projects are not just for showcasing but they address the requirements of the residents. He explains how …

What are smart projects being ruled out in Hague? What were your priorities?

We have started off with six projects to gain experience and to incorporate the same in the strategy. Now we are in the phase of getting our strategy implemented. The roll outs include projects on intelligent parking system, smart roads, smart education and smart citizen projects.

All the projects chosen are designed keeping the end-users in mind and of-course the scalability of the projects as required.

Can you share some of the hurdles you faced while initiating and implementing the projects? How did you try to overcome these challenges?

Smart city projects are basically IoT connectivity in data for which we have to open up our streets and deploy fiber optics which is almost a no go in old cities. So what you see today is pilot projects limited to some areas which are difficult to scale. To successfully scale any project, we need work involving different departments and no-body wanted to give up their authority.

So it’s important to centralise the decision making process and ensure co-operation amongst the different teams in order to execute large projects. The most difficult thing is to get people to give up their limited authority and get to a higher level, especially, in Netherlands where sharing is very important in democratic process and every stake holder has a say in decision making process.

What were your Key mile stones?

The pilots we do give us an idea of what we need to have in place in order to be successful. So we already have milestones in place. You know how the process will go when you have a successful pilot. Normally 75-80 percent of pilots gets killed at this stage. So when you have small success you have people coming to you. We facilitate smart city link implementations and do not assume ownership of the same.  Because, it is the responsibility of municipal body, but to get them on board we facilitate with them at every stage and get them to a point from where they can assume the project ownership.

How did you go about choosing the right projects and what were your key concerns while choosing the same?

We did our initial projects to decide on where we should focus our attention and to identify the important issues we would run into. We had to have political support, we had to have five mayors on board so we had to make it their project. We picked one projects which was important for the mayors so that they could include them in their profile.

Secondly, we identified only big projects what had multiple municipality service lines to identify different problems and we also made sure that we choose works that had something similar to data so that we could integrate them on data platform as this enables us to demonstrate the value of collecting data and sharing the same.  Most importantly all the projects we choose also had things that addressed the issued faced by our society. We picked up mobility and renewable energy instead of something like a smart city airport project.

What about the implementation part? What are the experiences that you would like to share with other cities?

In general city municipalities do not have enough IT resources to implement smart city solutions on their own. Generally, we look at existing ways to sort our issues. When you want to do something new one may have to go out the way to get things done and gain knowledge. Today we have multiple vendors offering smart city solutions. Local telecoms also drive a lot of smart city implementations as they are at the centre of our activities.

Benjamin emphasis on developing a proof of concept for any project. Pilots are great in gaining knowledge, but role of city is to deliver services to its inhabitants. So if you want to do things try to look at it from that perspective. That helps a long way in getting things done. 

We also seen lot of pilots being undertaken from research perspective. Pilots give a lot of insights but they have to undertaking with a sense of responsibility to make services better and cheaper. The proof of concept will not only help us evaluate technical points but also evaluate on funding and implementation and how to manage the project.

Many smart city solutions profiles tend to address specific problems. If we have to deliver complete solutions, we need to do it across services lines. So we need to make teams work in coalition to bright the right solutions across. And the third thing is finance because there is not a single city to pass the budget I would say budgets are decided based on governments responsibilities towards its people and typically five percent of the budget comes under free spending it goes to political goals of the city officials. So we have to define the budget within the existing structure. 

Budget and Choosing project locations

When you are looking at re-developing an area there would already be an existing budget with just 10-15 per cent to replace your lighting infrastructure. And one needs to take into account the depreciation factor on current investments and wait for a long time to replace current investments. 

But when you are working on a new part of the city or developing something grounds-off there is budget for parking or lighting and smart implementation there would not be a significant burden. It would also be a sustainable model because everything you do there is easy to justify.

How do you determine ROI from your projects? 

We spend money on health care and impossible to have ROI calculator for that. Basically, the ROI has to come from the market as it is the services that makes money. However, we have quality services that people appreciate. 

The other way of seeing this is how we were doing things normally and now we do it now So that is also business case if we look at the parking, the way we have implemented is that store owners would pay the parking fee were as normally we would have collected in fee from users. We also need take into account the jobs created by the smart project implementations. These ROIs are rather interesting as you can get political clout which means more money to do more projects. 

PARTNER

Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

PARTNER

CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

PARTNER

Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATION

SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

PARTNER

HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

PARTNER

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

Send this to a friend