The key to developing a successful smart city – Part 2

Yasser Mahmud

On a global scale, more people are moving into urban areas rather than rural. According to The United Nations World Urbanisation Prospects report, by 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities. As a result, city infrastructure has to adapt to cope with the rapid increase in population density.

The adoption of smart city initiatives will aid cities in developing and maintaining the various infrastructure projects and achieving the outcomes and results envisioned by city leaders and officials.

Along with the pressures on cities to maintain a sustainable infrastructure, cities also face significant global and local competition. City investors need traceable information on how funding was appropriated to projects and vendors, says Yasser Mahmud and Joel Cherkis of Oracle, in this second part of a 2-part blog.

Smart city initiatives and solutions are key to ensuring a faster city transformation through increased project delivery, better project management and increased sustainability of infrastructure. These projects need to be completely transparent across all stages, giving full visibility to city leaders and administrators, project team members, investors and others who need access to real-time information.

Joel Cherkis

Smart city solutions – Working across multiple verticals

Smart city project portfolio management solutions (PPM) must work successfully and seamlessly across a number of verticals within a city’s infrastructure. These solutions need to be built on high-performance technology and include the following capabilities:

    • Capabilities to track costs and assets: Providing solutions to operate and maintain smart city infrastructure in a cost-effective manner by tracking, monitoring and maintaining assets, facilities and buildings across the entire city. Tracking and maintaining the performance of these solutions is also essential to ensure the long-term sustainability of these measures.
    • Enhanced portfolio management: Having complete transparency across all project portfolios and multi-year objectives provide a more holistic approach to identifying and delivering solutions across multiple verticals including financial services, retail and hospitality sectors and for both private and public sector initiatives. The ability to have a comprehensive platform with integrated analytics enables critical data to be viewed in one place; data can then be used to take action based on these insights, and it provides consistency across the entire project portfolio.
    • Ensuring an enterprise-wide and completely transparent view of project portfolios: To capture multi-year objectives across all departments and sectors. A holistic approach is also key to identifying and appropriating solutions across multiple verticals for both private and public sector initiatives. This includes maintaining a comprehensive platform and integrated analytics to view all critical data in one place with consistency across an entire project and turn this data into actionable insights.
    • Anywhere, anytime access: Giving anywhere, anytime access to all project team members to access information wherever they are with Smart City PPM, is key. It ensures all project members have constant visibility across multiple stages of a project, which they can leverage through mobile applications and other smart devices
    • Web and mobile interface: Providing project members with full visibility and easy accessibility to real-time information through both web and mobile interface. This helps to increase connectivity between project members for quick and easy status updates via simple, easy-to-use devices. The use of web and mobile solutions must be integrated into the existing communications infrastructure and be easy to deploy by all team members.

Smart PPM solutions

Smart PPM solutions are not only deployable to traditional on-premise solutions but are now also available via cloud computing services, particularly as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This cost-effective model can also be leveraged through mobile technology to rapidly improve efficiency in operations and eliminates double administration.

By integrating cloud-based technology into your Smart City PPM solution, team members will be able to deploy the solution rapidly and efficiently, while staying on schedule.

The emergence of ‘smart buildings’ using IoT and cloud data is transforming not only how companies build, but also how we manage and maintain the life of these important assets. The technology solutions for these initiatives enable a shift to predictive, conditions-based maintenance within city infrastructure that is based on real-time and historic performance data from the equipment itself, as well as from similar equipment operating around the world.

These solutions allow organisations to see indicators of any potential problems, effectively take corrective actions, while ensuring long-term sustainability and ultimately optimising the quality of life for citizens.

The authors of this blog are Yasser Mahmud, vice president of Industry Strategy, Oracle Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit and Joel Cherkis, global vice president of Infrastructure, Government, Education, and Health, Oracle’s Global Industry Solutions Group.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_ OR @jcIoTnow

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