An integrated vision of urban processes

A new style of holistic city management with Smart City Monitor

Modern cities are complex and big Systems of Systems consisting of many interconnected subsystems and IoT. There is no single, “just right” approach or standard to how to manage such complex systems. Many factors play a crucial role in a successful community management, among them committed leadership and clear goals and transparency of performance and accountability structure and effective tools supporting smart governance.

Rapid changes and accelerated urban dynamics show that anyone who needs to manage city processes effectively needs actual data about ongoing results in real time. Various indicators of performance are presented in the latest international standards of quality of life and governance.  In addition, each city has its own individuality in the style of its management and needs for own key performance indicators. It is impossible to copy someone’s success and paste it into another urban area that has unique own problems and opportunities.

At the same time, most of the cities have many common issues: public transportation, energy, environment, water supply and its quality, urban development, services for health, emergency, safety, recreation, education, waste, governing processes, finance, economy. The processes are interlinked and diverse making their holistic vision, monitoring and analysis difficult.

Developing information systems supporting effective performance and accountability management and command and control requires a lot of resources, time, expertise and commitment to replace non-productive activities. Its implementation and introduction of such systems have inherent risks and uncertainties.

Among the options existing nowadays, Smart City Monitor is a unique open digital transformation instrument answering the needs of small and medium cities for a simple, customisable and cost-effective data-driven management support system assisting the administration in smart local governance that allows effectively improving the performance and urban services under limited resources and budgets. 

For which tasks can Smart city Monitor be applied?

• Automatically collecting all necessary data from a large number of different sources and systems existing in the city (spreadsheets, databases, automated systems, accounting, sensors, IoT, etc);

• Transforming the data into a clear holistic vision of performance and accountability for the city management, its various departments and services;

• Assisting employees in a continuous improvement of the results and productivity of public administration and its agents;

• Systematic monitoring the sustainability status in key operational areas in the new style of innovative forward-looking city management;

• Setting performance goals and smart easy options to keep an eye on every target city process or operational area;

• Providing easy and simple city dashboard presenting the status of the city life and performance at a glance assisting city management in smart responsive effective governance;

• Setting advanced command and operations control information centre for a city being cost-effective and easy maintained.

What is Smart City Monitor?

In short, it is a data-driven adaptive and flexible and AI-driven digital transformation software that automatically collects diverse data from many sources and digitally transforms in into customized services and controls in real time. The transformation includes estimation of sustainability of any target urban processes and its trends, evidence benchmarks. It assists management and employees in smart management of operations in compliance with international standards, condition monitoring of assets and processes, analytics and improvement of the performance of city administration, departments and service providers. The key system feature is its ability to deal with big data streams in real time and transform them into a holistic vision of sustainability of the whole big urban system and its subsystems and components.

The Smart City Monitor assists in making quick and validated decisions, addressing critical needs and seizing new opportunities. It is a flexible open solution that can be customized to the needs and operational priorities of each city. The city dashboard provides an overview of all urban objects selected by a user and supports any necessary drill-down analysis at any time using common mobile devices.

Smart City Monitor provides the cost-effective digital transformation solution answering the needs of many small and medium cities which are interested in the practical prototyping of Smart City concepts. Its customization and scalability power fosters experimenting with novel options in digital agenda and economy, services and new business models for different urban stakeholders. It brings new types of knowledge-intensive jobs for local communities.

What value brings Smart City Monitor to in the city management?

First, after beginning the first practical steps in the local implementation e.g. in a City Operational Command and Control Center, the municipality receives the Open Urban Model that complies with key international standards of quality of life such as ISO 37120. The model runs immediately on the local Smart City digital transformation engine after the City has its own engine in a cloud or at premises.

It includes complete urban structure and indicators accordingly to the ISO standard providing KPI of the performance for the whole city. The model structure can be easily expanded further to add districts, various urban areas, streets and buildings. After it is linked to local data sources, the model immediately runs at Smart City Monitor engine for the city transforming data streams into various information services tuned to each user needs and opens a holistic view of urban processes for the smart local governance. The local urban model can be gradually upgraded in multiple steps proving more detail for various local objects, urban processes, businesses by optional indicators and data sources which city management needs for the daily life and operations.

What’s good in the city model by ISO 37120 that it is ready for use and provides the initial selection of key object areas, supports detailed analysis of results by standard KPIs and allows its further upgrading to accommodate local urban structure and indicators of performance. It saves time and money for the city budget to start immediate use of the technology for monitoring and analysis by the employees of the municipality, its consultants and utility management. New structural changes, further upgrading and advancement of the urban model can be easily introduced with interactive urban model builder instruments.

The city obtains its copyright for own Urban Model and rights for its further development by its local Smart City team or dedicated operational information centre or relevant service provider.

Second, the Smart City Monitor enables municipality employees to collect, digitally transform and analyze large amounts of local evidence data about ongoing urban processes automatically in real time. It decreases overhead costs for all relevant routine activities and provides decision-makers powerful tools for monitoring and analytics of trends, examining the cause of events and its effects, improving control and sustainability. Hidden problems that previously might have been missed can be brought now to the surface promptly fostering proper decisions and actions in right time. Smart City Monitor can be seen as an accountability tool which just can help in city management improve city services and enables administrations to provide citizens with required transparency over the results and achievements in real time. 

The administration receives powerful capacity to control and command, monitor, benchmark and analyse all city processes as a whole or by each urban object of the urban model linked to its open data sources e.g. organizations, service providers, residence buildings, streets, moving vehicles, recreation and sports areas, etc. While having a holistic vision of the city, it provides drill-down options for analysis of causes of problems, prompt notification alarms and control results of corrective actions.

Where to start?

City municipality does not need much effort and costs to start own road to implementation of Smart City concepts. Our team is ready to guide in the planning of the project, identification of the local partners to provide support, relevant training, Smart City Monitor installation and selection and linking to necessary initial data sources that are available.

The city management and employees can quickly obtain first results, set own data to access policies for the city stakeholders and performance metrics based on the available data sources. Then the Smart City Monitor will run continuously collecting all big data streams and transforming it into necessary and useful information for each stakeholder group to provide transparency of results, the efficiency of operations and activities, assess the daily quality of life and overall sustainability of urban processes. 

The initial experience will provide a new vision of smart governance options and empower expanding the urban model to add new urban processes, assets and options supports the enhancement of life in the new Smart City project implementation.  

Examples

Click here to see example dashboard for some urban area in real time provided by Smart City Monitor online 

The online demo application "Smart City Monitor" provides a practical example of the solution implementation. For the purposes of clarity and simplicity, the demo was made accordingly to definitions of relevant standard ISO 37120:2014 “Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life”. It includes a definition of city sub-systems as theme-objects and all relevant core indicators. The demo city map illustrates the presentation of various city services and its performance for a sample city of 60 000 inhabitants. In practical project implementations in the cities, the Smart City Model has much larger number of objects, indicators, geo-locations, data sources, relevant events and customised dashboards, reports and mobile applications.

Have questions about practical projects? Welcome to contact us. You can follow us at Twitter: @MonitorSmart