What Indian goerment should consider for planning Smart City

Smart Cities Mission, sometimes referred to as Smart City Mission, is an urban renewal and retrofitting program by the Government of India with the mission to develop 100 smart cities across the country making them citizen friendly and sustainable. The Union Ministry of Urban Development is responsible for implementing the mission in collaboration with the state governments of the respective cities.

Well defined vision,good planning and technology leaders/architects are needed to build this smart city ecosystem. They need to operate in the intersection of technology, innovation, business, operations, strategy and people. This is the “no man’s” land where traditional boundaries, processes, policies and rules fail. This is where the hardest problems are. and that's the key challenge to implement smart city.

In building the cities of tomorrow, these smart city ecosystem architects must focus on some key areas:

1. Break silos and build bridges. 

A sustainable and well functioning smart city is a seamless integration and smooth orchestration of people, processes, policies and technologies working together across the smart city ecosystem. The architects unify teams across municipal departments to achieve the goal. There is need to connect public and private organizations within the ecosystem & build consensus to co-create the new city.

2. Sound Vision and well defined goals. 

A smart city is not about technology, but about using technology together with the various ecosystem layers to create the ecosystem. These results should be aligned around the needs of the city – government efficiency, sustainability, health and wellness, mobility, economic development, public safety and quality of life.

3. Engage a broader community of innovators. 

Within the smart city, innovation and value creation comes not only from municipal agencies but from businesses, communities (business districts, “smart” buildings, housing complexes), and individual residents. Smart city ecosystem architects unify the various layers to enable, incentivize, facilitate and scale this larger community to co-create the smart city together.

4. Invest in policy making and partnerships at the beginning

Policies and partnerships are the catalysts of the smart city. Policies and partnerships leverage and amplify limited city resources and capabilities, help to scale faster, while minimizing risk. The smart city ecosystem architects address the needs of policymakers, technologists and innovators to create sensible policies that create the right outcomes. Policy makers need to create platform to proactively seek out public and private collaborators and build sustainable and synergistic partnerships.

5. Create unified data and not data islands

Data is the lifeblood of the smart city. Open data, generated by municipal organizations, is only one source of data. When supplemented with data created by businesses and private citizens, it yields richer insights and better outcomes. Smart city ecosystem architects utilize the full extent of the ecosystem to create “unified data”. They plan and build data marketplaces, robust data sharing and privacy policies, data analytics skills, and monetization models that facilitate the sourcing and usage of “city data”.

6. Manage connectivity as a strategic capability. 

While connectivity is mission critical, today’s smart city ecosystem architects are faced with several challenges – unequal access to basic connectivity, inadequacy of existing services & a confusing array of emerging wireless network. In the smart city, connectivity is not an option nor is it someone else’s problem to solve. Smart city architects must lead with new policies and public private partnerships. They must develop new innovative investment strategies & create new connectivity ecosystems with city owned, service provider owned, and community owned infrastructure

7. Smart City needs modern IT infrastructure. 

Most of the smart city infrastructure is confused integration of legacy systems, purpose built departmental technology and smart city point solutions. Cities must modernize their digital infrastructure, while expanding integration to the broader external ecosystem. Cyber-security and technology policies, processes and systems must be revised to be smart city centric, not IT centric. Digital skills, from data analytics, machine learning to software engineering, must be the new competencies of the smart city.

8. Design  Secure Systems

The smart city is only as smart as the trust its stakeholders have in it. Smart city architects must design for trust across the entire ecosystem. The technology infrastructure must be secure. Information collected must be protected, and used protecting owners’ privacy. Policies, legislation and technology must be continuously aligned to maintain the right balance of protection, privacy, transparency & utility. The infrastructure must be robust, resilient and reliable.