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How Whittlesea views Connectivity and the Power of Place in it’s Smart City vision

How Whittlesea views Connectivity and the Power of Place in it's Smart City vision

One of the great advantages of attracting technology early is the so called ‘first mover’ advantage.  The ‘first mover’ advantage enables you to be able to market your community and attract the early adopters or those that are already using the technology for competitive advantage.

The City of Whittlesea, is on the northern fringe of Melbourne in Australia. The municipality is a growth area which is adding over 8000 new residents to the municipality each year mainly due to greenfield development or converting rural land into urban land and creating new suburbs.

Council has noticed the impact of this ‘first mover’ advantage with the types of people buying into the municipality. The municipality has traditionally been a blue collar workforce, with manufacturing being the key sector of employment. Council has been tracking the changes to demographics using an annual census style survey.

Analysing the survey data shows that in 1997 the percentage of the local workforce classified as being professional was 7%. This slowly grew to about 15 % and plateaued at that level until 2012, when it shot up to 25% and has retained that level since. It is postulated that the growth is fuelled by two main drivers.

The first is the greenfield development which uses great land planning to build new communities with a village feel using town centres and interconnected community spaces linked by parks and trails. This has been a constant driver that has attracted a constant influx of new families looking for an attractive place to raise their children.

The second driver is the broadband connectivity which has been facilitated through a series of Council facilitated programs conducted over the past 16 years. These programs have attracted over $100 million investment in high speed fixed line broadband since 2006. The municipality currently has about 30,000 active premises with optic fibre infrastructure providing 100 Meg/bit/sec. This covers half the municipality and is well above most municipalities in Australia.

Council’s first fibre to the premise (FTTP) housing development was launched in 2006 but Council attracted the federally funded National Broadband Network (NBN) program in 2010. This resulted in a large rollout of FTTP in 2012. The increase in the growth of professionals coincides closely with the rollout of optic fibre networks.

These demographic changes included a significant number of IT professionals and many home based businesses who made the move to Whittlesea to take advantage of the low cost high speed broadband. One example was a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) provider who moved from a different part of Melbourne to the City of Whittlesea to reduce his broadband service costs from $12,000 per month for a 10 Meg/per/sec symmetrical digital subscriber line (DSL) service to $400 per month for four by 100 Meg/bit/per/sec fibre services provided by one of the NBN internet service providers. The prime reasons they moved was the reduced cost to run the business and have high speed access at home in combination with the area being a great place to raise their family.

Having the first mover advantage has been a great way to attract talented people into the community and create more diversity into the demographics. In the future it is expected that it will reflect in the sorts of businesses that will emerge in the community and greater diversity of opportunities available to residents.

While the first mover advantage is a useful driver of change, eventually other communities will catch up and get similar levels of technology capability. Then the question becomes: what will be the competitive advantage that our community has to attract and retain talent if other areas have similar technology?

The answer will strongly feature place. Using the power inherent in a highly connected world allows many of the benefits of cities to be accessed from wherever people choose to be when the high speed broadband is in place and being utilised. This means that if you can fully participate in economic and social life from wherever you live, you will likely pick the place which best meets your broader needs.

Some people will choose to stay near their extended family and be able to maintain friendships from their childhood networks throughout life without compromising economic, educational and health opportunities. For others it provides the opportunity to find a place to reside where they want to live such as a scenic spot near the beach or in the mountains. Therefore the key differentiation will more likely be locations that are attractive and more about liveability. This is the power of place.

Those places that are the ‘most liveable’ while still retaining access to opportunities that traditionally the city provides will attract the best people and potentially become the hubs of vibrant activity. It may even lead to the decline of cities as the more toxic by-products of high density such as congestion, poor air quality and lack of tranquillity become drivers to shift people out of the city to other more liveable places.

This power of place means that developing your community into a smart city should not preclude you working on creating attractive and liveable places for your community to live and work in. Looking at the impact of increased connectivity and its broader impact on local communities can help add sustainability to your strategic planning. With increased connectivity comes dynamic changes to the way society operates.

At the City of Whittlesea, our focus is on creating sustainable communities together with our constituents. Council is constantly looking ahead to foresee the changes that technology is bringing not only to our economic space but to the core of our society.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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