Big cities need Big Data

We are entering the age of cities. Half of our population, more than 3.5 billion people, now live in or around cities. It is forecasted that by 2050, 8 out of 10 people will live in urban areas. As the level of urbanization increases, we are facing new challenges. What would you improve to make life in your city better? Reduce traffic jams, provide more reliable public transport, make streets cleaner and safer, offer better services and new opportunities for businesses? The opportunities are unlimited.   

I like the vision of Barcelona - reinventing the city through technology. Over past few years, the city has adopted a number of technological innovations that place it on the leading edge of city management, where cloud services and modern devices play a transformative role in supporting these initiatives.   

It starts with empowering city employees by providing them with the latest devices and infrastructure needed for a modernized workplace, as well as cloud based communication and collaboration tools to enhance the employee experience while also saving money. Just to give you one example - police and firefighters now receive their payroll receipts by email—saving the city 30 percent of the cost of an on-premises solution.  

Of course, the city is primarily focused on the needs of its citizens, such as better management of their requirements and conversations between city and its inhabitants. Barcelona chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM to record the history of interactions between people and government, including social media, to identify most pressing areas of concern, analyze them and identify common characteristics or experiences. This will enable city employees to focus on the most relevant issues as well as to create a proactive and personalized approach, through direct communication channels, taking advantage of new communication technologies, such as mobile, email, web, and social networks.

 Every city is a living organism producing a huge amount of data. People use apps on their mobile devices, connect to social networks, login to GPS. The city infrastructure sends information from thousands of sensors. To harness these opportunities, Barcelona decided to create an affordable, easy-to-use Big Data solution on the Microsoft cloud platform.  By taking advantage of these technologies, the city has an access to useful insight into petabytes of data anytime and anywhere to improve citizens’ quality of life, uncover investment opportunities, promote public safety and health, and provide a possible smart-city template for other areas.

 For example, Big Data platform was used to streamline the planning for Spain’s largest festival, La Mercé, by analyzing petabytes of real-time data from social media feeds, financial transactions, GPS, traffic, and weather data, parking records, web site visits, and more. 

Having gained confidence in the scalability and security features of Microsoft Azure, Barcelona City Council took a next step and embarked on OpenData initiative. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to promote economic growth by encouraging data sharing between city government and the private sector. #futuredecoded #microsoftcz #futuredecodedcz

 Find out more on how technology can help make the city life better: https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/government/city-of-barcelona-2/