Cities getting "smart"

Please pardon me if I have become overly cynical of the word "smart," when used to describe a new product or field of work, but I have been around long enough to have seen the word gain the gold star of cliché in the marketing lexicon. My first brush was with Mastercard's "SmartMoney" campaign in the ‘90s. Compared to the state of the credit card industry back then, today’s Bitcoin looks like an act of magic. Next, we had Samsung's branding of internet connected televisions as SmartTV. I guess it was preferable over referring to the product as the connected idiot box, but for all the brains inside, it did nothing to reign in the terrors that are the Kardashians or Impractical Jokers, so it’s acumen was questionable.

More recently, we have smart bots and assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Alexa, who likely would have posed far more informed, pointed questions of Mark Zuckerberg during his congressional testimony than he faced from members of the House and Senate, but like a bad date, can’t seem to hold a conversation past, "so do you want to hear a knock knock joke"?

This is all a long winded way of saying that I approach the hot topic and field of "smart cities" with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Ever since CES 2018, with its focus on autonomous and connected vehicles, I have been paying closer attention to the conversations going on around the topic of how Enterprise and Public Policy/Government have been engaged in dialogue and partnership to prepare and build out the infrastructure for looming “smart” world.

I recently had the opportunity to join in a discussion organized by the Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC) around the topic of "Smart Cities.” Founded by a friend of mine, Greg Kahn, the IoTC has been a key factor in educating and evangelizing the IoT space to C-Suite leaders. They have been providing a good platform for its 65+ company membership and innovation executives from leading American cities to discuss public private partnerships and ways for the public and private sectors to tackle quality of life issues and business evolution in an IoT world. I was struck at how much executives from IoTC member companies such as Verizon and Mastercard were willing to share with the room as it related to their strategic planning efforts and existing partnerships with municipal governments. I was also impressed at the leadership of IoTC’s Advisory Board, as evidenced at this breakfast by Brenna Berman, a former CIO of the City of Chicago moderating a panel of member executives.

One of the more notable initiatives that was discussed on the Berman-moderated panel was Chicago’s “Array of Things” which is a network of over 500 sensors spread throughout the city of Chicago, coordinated through a collaborative effort among leading scientists, universities, and community leaders to generate data to enhance quality of life and create efficiencies for the citizens of Chicago. This data is completely open-source and free to all to better understand some of the challenges of urban living, including air quality, flooding, traffic patterns, etc.. The data is available to all at https://data.cityofchicago.org/. The IoTC leadership expressed a commitment to furthering this sort of collaboration and to spreading the message of the potential for municipal adoption of this sort of IoT technology in the form of sensors and monitoring.

One example of tangible programming to emerge from data generated in this Chicago pilot is the Cubs Night Game Alerts. The data showed that the combination of commuters and Cubs baseball fans were causing dangerous congestion and delays on Chicago’s “L” train. The Game Nights Alerts offered train riders benefits in exchange for changing their travel times or routes to ease congestion on transit lines. These benefits are offered in real-time via SMS text and could save the city millions per year, according to projections.

The participants more broadly expressed a keen interest in expediting the integration of 5G telecommunications infrastructure into cities; however, as one executive at the gathering from Verizon pointed out, 5G is just now in the early stages of being rolled out. We are only aware of the theoretical ways it has the potential to transform cities, and the IoTC folks at the panel expressed their commitment to investing in the conversation via its membership and industry relationships.

What’s clear to me is that partnerships between public and private sectors will define how far cities will progress in the ensuing years. It was refreshing to hear a MasterCard executive state clearly that their goal is to make cities more inclusive and efficient. Yes, they are looking at the myriad of new payment opportunities and data that will be driven by the smart city, but to allay fears and have people embrace the new world, real utility and benefits to the day to day lives of a city’s citizens are critical to display. Michael Mattmiller, a former Seattle CTO and current IoTC Advisory Board Member stated that partnerships are incredibly important given his and other city’s bandwidth constraints. He also shared insight that Seattle, which has a strong Libertarian community, works closely with the Future of Privacy forum and others to make informed decisions around data privacy.

I started this rant saying that I was skeptical about the concept of “smart cities,” but that doesn’t mean that I am not hopeful. After all, it may have taken longer than planned, but our credit cards now have chips and are “smarter,” SmartTVs have evolved and now recommend shows based on our viewing habits and allow us to access a far greater array of media than our cable provider has in its pre-packaged bundles. The “Ambient Internet” is quickly becoming a daily part of our lives with Alexa considered a part of many extended families.

I think the best approach is to keep your expectations in check, as Smart Cities will develop in iterative stages, but the benefits for major urban centers is clear and, I believe, it will be a catalyst for innovation. For me, just make the city smart enough so that I am not sitting a stoplight for 10 minutes when there is no one else around. I am a man of small needs…