When Smart City Initiatives Fail - and Why

12 factors that contributed to smart city hardships

I have often joked that, in this age of countless and often repetitive Smart City conferences, the one that would probably prove most successful at this stage is the so-called "Smart Cities Worst Practices Summit." Beyond the pun: not the front-end PowerPoint will provide city leaders the best of insights. But the back end to those same presentations, the pitfalls, the lessons learned, the failures, actually can prove helpful. In my book, "A New Digital Deal. Beyond Smart Cities. How to Leverage Digitalization for the Benefit of our Communities" I have dedicated a chapter to those lessons learned. A summary below.

It can be of great help to those pursuing a community digitalization strategy today to review the litany of smart city trials and errors already experienced, as well as the prerequisites for successful community digitalization initiatives. In my recent book ‘A New Digital Deal’ a comprehensive attempt has been made to arrive at both: a framework of 20 building blocks for successful community digitalization has been proposed, while the framework leverages lessons learned in roughly 15 years of smart city initiatives, resulting in an analysis of the pitfalls to avoid. In this blog I produce a summary of the 12 most important factors that have limited smart city endeavours of the past.

1.      The Game of the Name: The term ‘smart city’ has proven to be a significant challenge in and of itself. Many definitions have existed and continue to exist. If a lack of clarity on the term prevails for a team or ecosystem pursuing a ‘smart city’ outcome, it can lead to confusion over objectives, desired outcomes, success metrics, and methodologies to apply. It then typically excels in PowerPoint only. The term ‘smart city’ remains a vague concept at best, and ’smart’ implies a dichotomy that doesn’t actually exist and isn’t helpful. That’s largely because ‘smart’ isn’t a singular state of being or a static destination, it’s a process and an evolution. ‘Smart’ remains too broadly defined and, perhaps, still insufficiently understood to truly define an actual approach or strategy to digitalization.

2.      Technology Myopia: Many smart city initiatives have ended up as technology demonstrations. Unless you represent a research and development unit within a company or university, and a technology demonstration truly is your goal, such an approach is typically doomed to fail. The inherent risk is getting caught up in an equation that starts out with a technology and ends with a technology, and throws a societal challenge into the middle. Technology is, of course, fundamental to a community digitalization strategy, yet it should serve as a means to an end – a beneficial societal outcome – and not the end itself. This holds true not only for community leaders, but also for digital solution producers. A research and development question articulated by a technology company that commences with ‘let us prove how technology A, B or C will improve X, Y or Z in society’ has limitations and may result in a useful technology proof of concept, but not in a viable smart city outcome.

3.      Solutionism: As a natural extension to the previous point, many smart city initiatives suffer from solutionism – that is, a situation in which the solutions become the objective of a smart city effort, rather than the solutions being a means to achieving a desired outcome. This pitfall typically has its origin in the engineering culture of many technology companies. This culture tends to push out solutions that are intended to make something ‘better’ (even if it was already good), which, often, translates into a series of efficiencies. Don’t get me wrong: engineering culture is great, it’s creative and, by and large, a force for good. And, efficiency can be a great and desired outcome in plenty of use cases, but not as the only desired outcome in a smart city undertaking. When smart city endeavours get built around solutions, projects are at risk of degenerating into solutionism, thus limiting the relevance to the community itself. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Richard Nixon: solutions are not necessarily the answer.

4.      Lack of Clear Objectives: It is often the case that what smart community-project stakeholders hope to achieve has not been clearly identified, stated, and agreed upon. Clear objectives are a must-have. Without them, defining what constitutes success or failure, or the threshold for scaling and replication, is impossible. Without clear objectives, the team may select and apply the wrong construct to the project. If the project’s purpose is only to test a new technology, then a proof of concept will suffice. If the purpose is to expose citizens to a new service, then a pilot with sufficient scale and organizational support may be the right option. But pilots and proofs of concept rarely demonstrate true value to the community. So where is the true value in the project and how will you recognize it when you see it?

5.      Smart Cities as a Matter of Public Sector Procurement: Government has an essential role to play in community digitalization efforts. However, in many smart city endeavours, smart city propositions have been targeted purely at government, with the public sector being the presumed customer, or the only customer. They sometimes may be. Yet the point here is that smart cities should not be seen as exclusively a matter of public sector procurement. They should become a market place. Cities are a canvas of societal digitalization with many actors (and customers) involved, the public sector being one of them. The business architectures of smart community programs can be complex, sales and procurement processes are often equally complex, and require a long-term approach. Successful smart community initiatives rely on effective and comprehensive ecosystems of partners at work, leveraging next-generation business architectures, as opposed to an overly large reliance on public sector budgets.

6.      Stuck in Silos: Many organizations, public and private alike, have traditionally been organized in silos – enclosed environments that harbor their own hierarchies, maintain their own systems and practices, and gather and retain their own data. Municipal governments have been golden examples. This approach serves the status quo and allows them to retain control of information. But this approach can also undermine efforts to craft truly effective management of a digitalization strategy. Digitalization applies (and must be managed) horizontally, across vertical domains, across systems, across data lakes, across fiefdoms, for it to be truly valuable. Digitalization does not belong to the IT department, nor the infrastructure department. It must be a shared set of policies, processes, assets, equipment and data for it to be truly powerful. It requires digitalization-ready governance across the various municipal organizations. Without proper governance across silos, smart city initiatives can only have limited success at best. Without a coordinated effort, expect costly parallel procurement duplications and early failure.

7.      No Plan to Replicate or Scale: Many smart city projects commence without the scale and the proper criteria that allow a demonstration of value. On top of that, often no plan for scaling has been articulated. Many smart city projects commence as pilots or a set of pilots without a plan for a scaling of efforts. Well-prepared procurement models, partnership structures, budgets, and appropriate business architectures are among the many factors that constitute the fundamentals of a given project’s ability to replicate and scale.

8.      Digital Divides and the Lack of Community Communications: digital divides within organizations that are relevant stakeholders in a smart city initiative unsurprisingly often slow the initiative down – or worse. If the goals, the means, the risks and the rewards of the endeavor are not collectively understood early on in the project, it can diminish the project and its outcomes at essentially every level. This is true for the companies and government agencies involved, but it can also apply to citizens. Thinking through the community communications and citizen engagement can be essential, depending on the use case or use cases in focus.

9.      Legacy IT, Sub-optimal Networks: a joke overheard in technology companies: God created the world in just seven days, but God did not have to deal with installed base. From a technology perspective, old, existing technology may not be optimal for integration into effective architectures that require to be seamless, secure and ultimately interoperable in order to implement high-end smart city solutions. Unsurprisingly, this is true for every segment of an architecture, starting out with rudimentary seamless connectivity. Plenty of city CTOs go out of their way to express their concerns over the existing networked basics in their communities. As Philadelphia’s CTO, Charles Brennan noted at the Smart City Council′s 2017 conference in Silicon Valley: ‘People often start with Apps. I start with a new broadband infrastructure’[i]. Plenty of smart city initiatives ended up frustrated by not sufficiently preparing for a rudimentary broadband infrastructure, and communities that have consistently invested in ‘future-proof’ networking over the years come prepared and move faster. Old software and legacy solutions pose no less of a challenge. If only one could declare certain legacy solutions dead. But as Brennan stated at the same Smart City Council gathering in 2017, cities often deal with ‘Zombie Software’ that seems to carry on forever, dramatically limiting the ability to deliver on innovations deemed desirable.

10.  Three Traps of the Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Dichotomy: A rich debate exists as to whether a smart city should be arrived at by a top-down or bottom-up approach. Technology companies are often perceived as the ones driving top-down strategies, whereas hacktivists, open source advocates, startups and small community-based initiative leaders are perceived as driving the inverse strategy. Here ia dichotomy that has outlived its usefulness and relevance, if it ever was useful or relevant. Neither side is right, per se, and you often need both approaches. Entertaining or conducting a top-down approach can very easily lead to a dead end: it may lack societal buy-in, fail to produce a validated, user-friendly design and may exclude badly needed innovations that could have been obtained through a more open approach. Bottom-up initiatives may be rich on citizen buy-in and energy, but often lack the resources to scale or the broad influence necessary to replicate. In short, to fully focus on a bottom-up approach is no less of a trap. The third trap is to believe in the existence of a top-down versus a bottom-up dichotomy at all; doing so colors our thinking in terms of conflict – conflicts of interest, conflicts as a result of a perceived inequality of power and influence (tech enterprises versus citizens, for instance), and conflicts of vision in what digitalization must entail. Situations may arise where such inequality of power may exist, but to articulate a community digitalization strategy with conflict as a central premise is unlikely to be helpful. Instead, any New Digital Deal as it applies to a smart community initiative should commence with an understanding of what is wanted and expected from all sides. To learn from past mistakes, in an attempt to get things right in the present and in the future, is to cast community digitalization as the work of a collaborative ecosystem that involves citizens, the public and private sectors, and big and small organizations together. It is a scenario that allows each stakeholder to do what he or she does best. It presents solution design as an iterative process involving a multitude of different players, each leveraging his or her own strengths. For long-term success, there is no other way.

11.  Closed Architectures: A roadblock in plenty of smart city initiatives has been digital propositions that involve proprietary, or closed, architectures. Evaluating these propositions often produces fear – an apprehension of getting locked in to a particular vendor’s architecture, especially if it seems to lack the flexibility to embrace near-future innovations. I’m here to say that concern over a lack of interoperability among an array of digital building blocks is a wholly rightful response and plenty of cities have faced this. Such concerns have obstructed success in smart city projects in two ways. First, city-led, digital innovation plans have gone quickly into hibernation mode as the result of an understandable apprehension among decision-makers of getting stuck. Second, for the cities that did opt for deployments involving closed architectures and proprietary solutions, many lost out on some of the value that would have been derived from interoperability, and innovations more open architectures can afford. Just think of the challenges: data being locked away, the city itself unable to access its own data or license a third party to access it. Imagine the limitations on updating functionality or adding interfaces without incurring high fees and being at the mercy of a single vendor. The fear is warranted when you consider the severely limited long-term usefulness of such an architecture. For many years, it seemed that cities were locked in a situation that can be best described as ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ It is only as of recent that sufficiently open architecture strategies and tools have become available to enable cities to stay clear from vendor lock-ins, proprietary limitations and prepare for architectures that are sufficiently interoperable and future-proof.

12.  You Must Be This Tall to Enter the Smart Cities Club: For a very long time, smart city initiatives comprised a set of activities that only large cities could manage. The know-how and resources required were prohibitive for smaller communities – and the benefits were articulated in ways that didn’t reflect outcomes of value for smaller communities (sweeping economies of scale, the breakdown of big data silos, and so on). Some smaller communities were able to paint a convincing picture of how they would digitalize, but stalled at the point where broader expertise and deeper pockets may have taken them to the next stage. That’s much less the case today. In fact, as community digitalization propositions have increasingly become as-a-service, cloud-based offerings, paid for on an as-needed, subscription basis (consumption economics), they can more easily be tailored to the requirements of differently sized communities. Furthermore, creating consensus is often easier in smaller communities, where key decision-makers are within one or two degrees of separation, than doing so in a complex megacity. Down the road, digitalization will likely become as ubiquitous as electricity: every community will be able to afford it and no city can afford to be without it.

"A New Digital Deal" (September 2017) is available on Amazon in print and Kindle editions. The Third Edition will see the light of day in March 2018