One smart platform. Endless possibilities.

Singapore is building what is touted as the World's first Smart Nation by harnessing technology and leveraging the emergence of IoT and big data to improve the lives of citizens, build stronger communities and in the process, increase productivity of enterprises and (hopefully) in the process, prepare both individuals as well as businesses to be more innovative and ready for the great leap ahead. 

And the leap is certainly a great one. In fact, if we are leaping or skipping bound by bound (bound: walk or run with leaping strides), the distance for each bound will only grow wider. Quoting 'Uday.io', human beings have a terrible intuition for exponential growth. If you are being asked on how many times you would have to fold a single sheet of A4 sized paper to reach the moon, it would be difficult to intuitively comprehend that it only takes twenty folds to reach Mount Everest, forty-two folds to the moon, and fifty to reach the sun! 

Instead of resisting, we need to watch these trends; we need to note how the world is changing and then adapt to it. Thus, Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, is a well-positioned strategy to rally the Singaporeans and the community together, and get ready for the brave new world. With the SkillsFuture national movement implemented, it is certainly hoped that each individual would be incentivised to take a positive step to upgrade himself or herself with the relevant technical skill set and asset. 

How can enterprises then respond to the Smart Nation initiative? A possible response would be to anticipate the mega-trends that will impact Singapore and the world, and provide solutions for real challenges which Singapore will face, such as an ageing population and an increasing urban density -- which would certainly place pressure on public safety, transportation, healthcare, education as well as on energy and sustainability. 

As a product management person in the Smart and Safe City Centre of Excellence over at NCS, this is the "Brave New World" that I embrace. How do I, my team, and my organisation help others achieve operational efficiency, situational awareness, improve engagement between operators and users, and enable data visualisation? How do we power the digital heartbeat of Singapore, via its digital network which would surely pulsate with information flow and actionable insights? 

We believe that the intelligent technologies that power an entire Smart City can also be applied to a cluster of buildings, or what we call a Smart Campus. Smart city initiatives are typically driven by governments using a "top-down" approach, in both policy making and infrastructure planning. HDB smart estates, such as Yuhua estate would be a good example. Some 9,000 Yuhua residents living in over 3,000 flats will be the first to experience "Smart Living" in an existing HDB estate, and see smart features which will enhance the residents' quality of life. Notwithstanding, a smart city could comprise many smaller smart campuses, be it a university campus, a hospital cluster, or even an industrial park. City planners also use IT infrastructure to optimise the flows of people and goods and hence aim to deliver public services more efficiently. 

On the other hand, citizens and enterprises generate and proliferate data to improve the way they work -- they somewhat act collectively and connect with each other to share resources. In India, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Initiative) encourages Indians to go about and "Swachhify India". The app, launched in late 2014, allows users to take pictures to report, geolocate and time-stamp streets that need cleaning or problems to be fixed by the local authorities. This app has great potential to facilitate the complaint and reporting process by providing empowerment to the citizens to become the "sensors" of the municipalities on the ground, who may have difficulties in grasping the ground issues that matter most to their residents. This example shows how a "bottom-up" approach can contribute not only in making cities smarter, but create a sense of ownership and empowerment to every citizen. 

Over time, we will need to harness the collaborative efforts of the "bottom-up" creativity from individuals and communities from the smart buildings and campuses, as well as the "top-down" policies from the government to create the smart cities that we desire. 

 Over at NCS, we believe in brokering the "top-down" initiatives with the "bottom-up" initiatives. With the exponential growth of data from our everyday lives, there is a need for an agile smart city platform that is able to integrate  information from various sensors, social media feeds and data points and surface meaningful connections among them to harness actionable insights. We name our smart city platform IntelliSURF? -- which stands for Intelligent SURF (Solutions for an Urbanised Future). 

Beyond this, the smart city platform must be agnostic to other third-party systems, and be evolutionary progressive to adapt to changing technological trends. Over and above this, the platform must also be contextualised to different verticals, where the use cases would be specifically different from the rest. For example, in a hospital cluster, the smart hospital campus would focus on effective patient engagement to aid patient recover, operations and care excellence for patient treatment, actionable healthcare insights, and more. We can classify this further into five smart campus pillars: 

• Security - monitoring of crowd density levels within a hospital area or buildings, especially restricted zones. 
• Facilities - Streamlining operational efficiency and enhancing patient experience by ensuring readily available wheelchairs. 
• Administration - Ensuring asset tracking for all hospital assets to improve utilisation and protect assets from loss. 
• Utilities - Visibility on energy and water usage allows for habitual changes in water and energy consumption, thus ensuring greater utility savings and greater sustainability. 
• Analytics - Harnessing insights from customers' feedback and acting upon them swiftly to ensure constant delivery of quality service. 

It is also with this consideration (i.e. of contextualisation) that we understand that every user will have their unique needs; and it is not possible to offer a single smart city platform version. With this in mind, we have positioned IntelliSURF with a suite of modules. The modules represent a range of functionalities designed with various user needs and requirements across various industries, so that the user can pick only the ones that are relevant to what is truly needed. Hence our tagline -- One Platform. Endless Possibilities. 

Just a week back, Minister for Communications and Information, Yaacob Ibrahim, said at a SGfuture Engagement dialogue session, that Singapore's Smart Nation initiative is just an idea; but for the idea to become reality, technology must become an enabler for ordinary people. The right policies must be enacted to promote technology adoption. The appropriate digital infrastructure must be developed to facilitate technology usage. Businesses must be motivated to be harness technology to be more productive. Citizens must be convinced to upgrade to be tech-ready. And perhaps, with a fusion of "top-down", "middle-broker" and "bottom-up" approach, all stakeholders would be buying their tickets to ride on this technology hyperloop.