Accessibility or Bust

February 28, 2012 7 Comments

(Photo: “Cable Confusion” by e-magic)

It’s been obvious since the 1990s that the communication and collaboration technologies that have evolved from the internet and mobile telephony are changing our planet – its culture, its environment and its economy. What’s differentiated those who’ve succeeded in applying those technologies from those who’ve failed is their ability to integrate them with society.

By society I mean people and the economy. People in the sense of the consumability and accessibility of technology; and the economy in the sense of adding value to the interactions between people. If technology isn’t consumable and accessible by people, and if it doesn’t add value to their interactions, it won’t be used.

James Watt and Matthew Boulton got this absolutely right in their industrial and commercial exploitation of the steam engine, which Jenny Uglow argued in her brilliant book “The Lunar Men” was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. Reuters got it right when they started a business using one of the original low-latency messaging technologies to distribute news around the world faster than anyone else – carrier pigeons.

We’re living through an era of acute financial, demographic and environmental pressures that we expect technology to rescue us from. The Internet of Things and Open Data will make information available to anyone, anytime to take better decisions, and use resources more efficiently. Internet entrepreneurs will continue to create innovative new business models. Cities everywhere will build digital industries to drive economic growth. The cost of transactions in public service and commerce will fall as delivery becomes “digital by default”.

Or will they?

People can only use information to take better decisions if they understand that information.

Take the transformation to open, digital, public services and personal budgets, for example, in UK public services. If individuals are to choose effectively which care services to purchase with their care budgets, then they need to be presented with comprehensible information that describes the range of services available to them. They need information describing what the services do; the quality of service outcomes and delivery; and who the provider of the service is. They need information describing who measures service quality, and how. They need information that describes whether they are eligible for the service, how much it costs, how to access it, and how to complain if something goes wrong. And that’s just for starters.

This is starting to sound like an awful lot of complicated information. Because we’re talking about social care, it needs to be presented to vulnerable people, who may have difficulty understanding it, and may not be able or willing to use digital technology.

Solving our problems using technology is not about Open Data, Open Source, or Agile Development or supporting the nation’s technology SMEs. All of those things are important, but they’re not enough. We need an acceleration of the rollout of broadband connectivity; we need to look at whether channels such as digital television and mobile can be used effectively; we need a really effective network of “living labs” to explore how people can interact effectively with these technologies; and we need to examine indirect user interactions with digital services, where a carer, a friend or a family member uses technology on behalf of someone else.

I’m exploring some of these issues in Sunderland, where the city has invested in broadband connectivity, Cloud computing, and a network of 39 “e-Village Halls” (see short articles on the Council’s website here  and here) which provide access to online information and transactions from community and neighbourhood centres in a trusted environment where help and advice are available. A few years ago, the Council ran a scheme called the “Let’s Go” Card where more than 2500 disadvantaged young people were given a smartcard with £33 a month to spend on leisure and educational activities that could be booked through an online portal. Many of the people in the scheme didn’t have direct access to the internet themselves; but they could get it through friends. The scheme was a huge success, with 94% of the eligible young people taking part.

The TSB’s Creative Industries KTN has looked recently at applying their expertise to the consumability of information provided by Smart Meters and other “Internet of Things” technologies; and I know of some other high-profile organisations who are developing similar plans. They’re starting to draw many private sector companies and Universities into their activities, and I think the results will be fascinating.

IBM’s own Andy Stanford-Clark has been interested in this subject for a while, and has explored the concept of ambient information interfaces which communicate information about domestic energy use in a non-technical way. And the NHS in the West Midlands is exploring effective ways to communicate healthcare information within a community of patients and employees through the NHS Local site. They have engaged a television production company, Maverick Television, to design the site using their expertise in communicating through technology. I hope that all of these initiatives will contribute to our ability to design smarter, digital city systems that we can all engage effectively in.

For me, this is the real shape of things to come. There’s been a lot of focus recently on improving the teaching of technology skills in the UK economy. But as I commented recently on this blog, to develop technology with real societal impact, we need to focus on a broader combination of technology, information, scientific, creative and entrepreneurial skills.

To put my money where my mouth is, I’m hoping to start a study project soon to explore that idea in more detail and create some recommendations for doing things differently. I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who’s interested in taking part.

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Who will be the next generation of technology millionaires?

February 16, 2012 8 Comments

(Image: “IT is innovation” by Frank Allan Hansen)

A few years ago I attended a dinner debate hosted by the British Computer Society about the future of technology careers in the UK. At the time, I’d recently written a report for IBM UK on the subject. The common motivation was to explore the effect of globalisation on the UK’s IT industry.

Despite the continuing emergence of high quality technology industries around the world, the local demand for technology skills in the UK was then, and is now, increasing. The secret to understanding the seeming contradiction is twofold.

Firstly, consider which specific skills are required, and why. To cut a long story short, the ones that are needed on-shore in countries with high wages such as the UK are the ones most closely tied to agile innovation in local economic and cultural markets, or to the operation of critical infrastructures (such as water, roads and energy) or operations (such as banking and law enforcement).

Secondly, the more fundamental point is that we’re living through an Information Revolution that is increasing in pace and impact. That means the demand for science, technology, mathematics and information skills is going through the roof across the board. As  evidence, consider this article from McKinsey on the hidden “Information Economy”; or the claim that 90% of the information in the world was created in the last two years (widely referenced, e.g. by this article in Forbes); or that IBM now employs more mathematics PhD holders than any other organisation in the world.

At the BCS debate, a consultant from Capgemini introduced the evening by describing his meeting that morning with a group of London-based internet entrepreneurs. These people were young (20-25), successful (owning and running businesses worth £millions), and fiercely technology literate.

Today, I wonder if the same meeting would be held with internet entrepreneurs? In ten years time, I certainly don’t think it will be – they’ll be genetic engineers, nano-technologists, or experts in some field we can’t imagine yet. Of course, there are already many early entrepreneurs exploring those fields, as was shown in Adam Rutherford’s recent BBC Horizon documentary “Playing God”  (see this video or this review).

I’ve blogged recently about the importance of skills, education and localism to the future of our cities’ and country’s economies. This leads me to believe that more important than addressing the UK’s shortfall in IT skills (as reported by e-Skills last year) is understanding how to systematically integrate the teaching of technology, science, creative and business skills across schools, universities and vocational education. Further, that needs to be done in a way that’s responsive to the changes that will come to the sciences and technologies that have the most power to compliment the unique economy, geography and culture of the British isles.

This is already a problem for the UK economy. The e-Skills report found that UK businesses are nearly 10% less productive than US ones; and that 80% of that gap is down to less effective use of technology. Their research predicts that closing the technology gap could contribute £50bn to the UK economy over 5-7 years. But their finding that the British Education system provides less than 20% of the technology skills we need today means that closing the gap will be hard.

As the information revolution proceeds, the problem will get worse. And unless we do something about it in an enlightened way that recognises that the science and technology skills we’ll need in 10 years time are not the IT skills that are familiar to us today, we’ll fail to address it.

I was born in 1970; for me, the Tandy TRS80 computer my family bought in 1980 was a technological marvel, with its 16k RAM and graphic resolution of 128×48 pixels (all of them green). Today, my 3 year old son is growing up with a high resolution smartphone touchscreen as an unremarkable part of his world. By the time he’s of working age, the world will be unrecognisable – as will the skills he’ll require to be successful in it.

From the earliest years, we need to be exciting children in the mixture of creativity; abstract thinking and modelling; mathematics, technology, art and entrepreneurialism that are apparent now in such forums as TED. (www.ted.com). Whatever their interest and acumen, we need to give them the opportunity to find their own niche in that range of cross-disciplinary skills that will be economically valuable in the future. If we don’t, they won’t be ready to find jobs in the industries of the future when the computer programming industry, and others as we know them today, disappear.

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How to pay for a Smarter City

February 2, 2012 3 Comments

(Photo of a halfpenny minted by Matthew Boulton in Birmingham; from Smabs Sputzer)

There are many definitions of what a Smarter City is; but a lot of them boil down to something that seems like common sense: spend some money doing things that have positive outcomes, rather than spending (much) more money trying (and often failing) to fix things that have gone wrong.

One reason that’s hard to do is that providing the accurate and holistic information needed to identify which preventative measures need to be taken where and when requires an investment in improving the systems that provide information to decision makers. That information might come from sensors on physical infrastructure; from people; from information systems; or from all of those sources.

Advances in technology are lowering the cost of collecting, integrating and exploiting that information; but the more fundamental problem is how to justify any investment at all in preventative action by one organisation when the benefits are realised by other organisations, some time later.

For example, (as is very well known) it has proven persistently uneconomic for network providers to deploy broadband coverage in areas with low economic activity. Despite the potential benefits to business and residents that technologies such as telecare and remote working could provide, there are simply not enough potential subscribers from whom network providers could collect revenues to recover the deployment cost. In most cases where this issue has been addressed, it is through Government or European grants – and those sources won’t provide a generally scalable financial model for Smarter Cities.

I haven’t figured out how to fix this; but I think I’ve realised what a couple of pieces of the puzzle are.

The global financial situation is forcing public sector organisations everywhere to make significant savings – around 10%-20% of their budgets. They can only do that by sharing capabilities such as IT services and back office processes. Of course, this results in job losses that cause real hardship, and I count friends, neighbours and colleagues among those who have lost their employment in this way.

But the resulting shared IT platforms do enable an opportunity to simplify the business case for investing in Smarter Cities. Those platforms can deliver IT capabilities to organisations in City regions at incremental cost. These days we call that Cloud Computing.

The multi-tenancy, automation of provisioning, and virtualisation of Cloud Computing enables capabilities paid for by a business case in one domain – such as predictive analytics and information portals – to be subsequently exploited at incremental cost in other domains. This way, business cases that to date have not been economically viable may now become so.

The majority of cities around the world need such capabilities to be available to Smarter City initiatives at incremental cost because they are not in the same financial positions as some of the most commonly referenced Smarter Cities. They do not have forthcoming global sporting events driving inward investment such as the Olympic Games or football World Cup, as London and Rio do. And they are not new-build cities in emerging economies such as China, paid for by strong growth in working populations and the economy.

For these cities, a Cloud platform can help them achieve Smarter City transformations through a carefully sequenced and co-ordinated series of investments, each of which is individually justified in one domain, but which adds capabilities that can then be cost effectively exploited elsewhere.

For example, case studies have shown how investments in information integration and analytic technologies can save money in delivering social care and reducing benefits fraud (see the examples from the London Borough of Brent in the UK and from Alameda County in the US (see this case study   and this video). In other cities where similar business cases are viable, information integration and analytics technologies could be deployed. If those technologies are made available to other City stakeholders through a regional Cloud platform on a commercial basis that reflects the ongoing operational cost of providing capacity, rather than the deployment cost of the platform, then the investment required to enable Smarter City solutions in other domains will be lower. It might make  traffic prediction solutions for commuters a viable investment to make, for example, in order to reduce the congestion that lowers economic productivity and job creation in cities.

This is likely to happen on regional city clouds rather than on nationally or internationally distributed public cloud infrastructures. The volume and velocity of the data required to generate timely insights based on holistic information means that the co-location of  data and analytics on a regional Cloud will be a vital for achieving the required performance and scalability.

I don’t claim that this approach will be straightforward or simple. The nature of Smarter City solutions in spreading across organisations, industry sectors and budgets will make the financial models and technology infrastructures – particularly in the areas of security, service management and resilience – a huge challenge.

But for the vast majority of cities, this approach is – in my opinion – the only way to make the investments that are required. I think 2012 will be a very significant year in the development of Smarter Cities. By the end of it, at the very least I’ll know whether I’m right or wrong.

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Which cities will get Smarter fastest?

January 30, 2012 5 Comments

Birmingham is a diverse city currently undergoing the latest of many periods of regeneration

Last week the Centre for Cities published a report that IBM sponsored giving its 2012 Outlook for Cities in the UK. The report assesses economic and demographic statistics with the intention of identifying the cities most likely to succeed in improving their economic activity and prosperity. You can download a copy here.

The report is an interesting read, and offers challenging findings for cities such as Birmingham, where I live – whilst it is the second largest city in the UK, Birmingham has significant challenges and appears near the bottom of rankings for employment and the level of skills in the workforce.

However, in focussing on statistical information, the report takes insufficient account of two crucial factors. Because the report is seeking to influence the investment of government funds in the cities it identifies as best placed to succeed, I think these important omissions should be recognised.

Firstly, it does not take into account the specific initiatives currently taking place in many cities. You only have to look at the effect on Birmingham’s retail economy of the Council-led regeneration of the Bullring shopping centre to understand how fundamentally cities can be changed. The Bullring is now one of the most visited destinations in Europe and has transformed a city centre that used to attract relatively few visitors from outside.

Steps are also being taken to address the skills of the city’s workforce. The University of Birmingham recently announced that it will open a secondary school teaching a curriculum designed to develop successful University students. And last year, Birmingham City University and Maverick Television were two of the sponsors for Birmingham Ormiston Academy, an institution that will provide vocational education in creative media and performing arts. You could see both of these as vertical integrations in the supply chain of skills for the city’s economy. Centre for Cities’ report does not take account of the effect that these initiatives will have.

Looking to the future, the Royal Academy of Engineering recently published a paper assessing the potential and challenges for Smarter City Infrastructures to transform our cities. Several case studies have shown the benefit of applying sophisticated instrumentation and analytics to physical and information systems in areas such as transportation, water and social care. We can expect cities to continue to exploit such advances to transform themselves in new and unexpected ways.

The Centre for Cities report also fails to consider the willingness and ability of the ecosystem of political, economic and social organisations and their leaders to take effective action. Sunderland, for example, a city where I frequently work (see many previous posts in this blog, starting here) also scores poorly in many of the statistics in the report. However, a well developed “Economic Masterplan” has been agreed across organisations in the City, and the City Council has already made investments in citywide Broadband and Cloud Computing intended to move it forward. The strength and cohesion of leadership and vision across the city will be a tremendous asset in its transformation; by contrast, cities with more fragmented leadership or less crisp visions may make progress more slowly.

The 2012 Outlook for Cities does contain a wealth of important information that can help our cities understand their challenges and opportunities; and Center for Cities’ previous detailed research on the structure of city economies is also worth reading; particularly in light of one of their conclusions that I do agree strongly with – “cities with less dynamic private sectors … will find it more challenging to offset the combination of a weak national economy and the ongoing shrinkage of the public sector”.

But anyone who looked at the statistics of the technology industry prior to Steve Jobs return to Apple Computers in 1997 would have probably predicted nothing more than a continued decline for that company into a niche market for the graphic design community. So I hope the UK Government keeps an open mind and makes holistic assessments of Cities’ plans for transformation and their ability to execute them when deciding where to make investments, rather than relying on indicators of past performance.

One thing is for sure, though: we should all expect to see some surprises. History’s most reliable lesson is that it’s an imperfect guide to the future.

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The economics and attractiveness of Smarter Cities

January 20, 2012 Leave a comment

(Photo of building work in Wembley from Mick Baker)

After a relaxing break over the festive season, I’m finally back up to speed with working life. It looks like an exciting year ahead; we’ve expanded our “Smarter Cities” team in the UK, and are working with some interesting clients and partners.

I met this week with the Bartlett Institute for the Built Environment at University College, London. We discussed how cities can make themselves “more attractive” places to live and work – a common priority of cities in the process of regeneration. A mixture of factors are involved such as lighting, education, the vitality of business and retail environments, transport, public safety and architecture. Technology isn’t central – but it’s going to be interesting to me as a technologist to see how it can play a role.

I’ve also been looking at how investment cases for Smarter Cities projects and transformations are constructed. A business partner commented recently that a good number – perhaps a majority – of Smarter Cities initiatives have been pilot projects rather than full-scale implementations; or have been part-funded by Government or EU Research programmes; or both.

There are exceptions, such as the London Congestion Charge scheme; that has an interesting mix of short-term return (it generates revenues that cover both investment and operating costs); longer-term economic benefits (by reducing congestion it lowers barriers to productivity, economic growth and job creation); and improvements to the city environment – it was an enabler for pedestrianisation in some areas.

A colleague of mine told me about the healthcare trust in Durham and Darlington that helped its local council pay for pavements to be gritted. It was “common sense” that by doing so they prevented people from slipping and thereby improved wellbeing and lowered treatment costs. Not everyone agreed with the practise – and one trust governor resigned in protest, particularly as there was no model to quantify and prove the benefits. Perhaps for the same reason, the practise has now stopped, a victim of public sector spending cuts.

It’s clear that we need new models and tools to calculate the financial, social and environmental costs and impacts of “Smarter” projects, so that we can build business cases and commercial vehicles for investing sustainably in them. Some of my colleagues were involved in a project to create such a model in Manchester – you can download a report on that project here after registering; and I spoke this week to another business partner who has been developing financial models in a similar space.

The UK Smarter Cities community is eagerly awaiting a decision by the Technology Strategy Board as to whether it will approve funding for a “Future Cities” Catapult centre; I have argued that a capability to construct such financial models should be a focus for such a centre if and when it is approved. I have my fingers crossed, and am hoping to hear news soon.

Building these models will bring challenges. For example, the pollution created by traffic congestion in cities has a measurable effect reducing life expectancy (see the reports here  and here ). So congestion charge schemes such as London or Stockholm should increase life expectancy. That’s clearly a wellbeing benefit – but financially speaking, it increases the costs of supporting the city’s population as it lives longer.

If we can get the models right, though, and evolve them to be usable by different cities for different Smarter City initiatives, then we may finally see the explosion in full-scale projects that we’ve been expecting – and that we’ll need to face the financial, demographic and environmental challenges facing us.

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Localism and economic regeneration in cities

December 22, 2011 10 Comments

(Photo by Jorene Rene)

Through the course of this year, I’ve spoken with stakeholders from a lot of cities in the UK about their goals for economic stimulus and regeneration. Often, those discussions start around how cities can use technology to boost economic growth, particularly for small and medium enterprise – in Sunderland, for example.

In very many cases, cities today have a focus on the “digital economy” as a source of economic growth. That’s not at all surprising given the digital economy is a significant and growing part of the UK’s GDP.

However, the digital economy is a very transferable economy; in his frankly titled 2007 paper “How Many U.S. Jobs might Be Offshorable?“, Alan Blinder of Princeton University concluded that “computer programming” was the easiest form of work to transfer from one physical location to another. So if cities want to build sustainable economic growth in the digital economy, we clearly need to think carefully about exactly what forms of “digital” activity that entails.

There are a number of ways to do that; for instance I  met a very interesting company recently, Lamasatech, who provide multi-touch screen solutions. Their technology is slick, exciting and leading edge. And whilst they do provide software, they also provide unique hardware technology. Their multi-touch surface is much more flexible and portable than other solutions I’ve seen. Access to science and leading edge manufacturing and materials are important elements of a successful digital economy.

In a similar vein, there’s a very interesting cluster of wireless technology expertise in Cambridge, epitomised by the Cambridge Wireless Network, and that encompasses science, design, engineering and technology. Some of the developments they’re working on in low-power, long-range wireless communication technologies such as the proposed “Weightless” standard could have a dramatic effect on the cost and feasibility of Smarter City and Smarter Planet solutions.

What’s particularly interesting about the Cambridge example is that it represents a self-reinforcing regional cluster; the critical mass of expertise in the region leads to innovative interactions which continually generate new value. Any other region attempting to stimulate economic growth in the same area of technology would have a significant challenge in developing to the point where it could compete against the Cambridge cluster.

Jay Bal from Warwick University wrote a very interesting paper in 2007 describing his work building online marketplaces to stimulate the formation and growth of such clusters. His West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace now drives contracts worth billions of pounds sterling every year into a cluster of small and medium enterprises in the West Midlands.

What’s key in Cambridge and in the West Midlands example is that one way or another the specific capabilities available in a particular region are being brought together in ways that create synergies. By design or by history, such regional clusters also have synergy with their physical environments, nearby academic institutions, the skills base created by the local education system, and other factors to do with “place”. In Sunderland, for example, there’s a long cultural tradition of social enterprise which will probably influence the future economic development of the city.

An interesting organisation seeking to exploit and enable these local synergies is Addiply. Addiply offer online advertising content – but they do it by enabling local businesses to sell online advertising space to other local businesses with whom they share complimentary markets and customer bases. By using advertising to create those local linkages, Addiply’s approach is one way to stimulate synergistic growth in local economies. Addiply’s CEO, Rick Waghorn, recently blogged about how he came up with the Addiply model, and how he thinks Addiply can compete against the big players such as Google Adwords by offering a more focussed value proposition.

As we go into 2012 with no let-up in sight from the tough and competitive economic environment we’ve been in for some time, I think these ideas will be crucial in shaping successful economic strategies in our cities and regions. It will be important to all of us that the cities that we live and work in use them well.

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Smarter Cities need Smarter Social Enterprises

December 14, 2011 16 Comments

The SES “Container City” incubation facility for social enterprise in Sunderland

I’ve just been at a great workshop with a variety of social enterprises in Sunderland, hosted by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES). The objective of the workshop was to identify ways in which social enterprises might harness new technologies to help them respond to – and exploit – the dramatic changes coming to social care and health in coming years – such as personal care budgets, Big Society, Open Public Services and GP commissioning of health services.

Mark Heskett Saddington, Director of SES, started off the day with some striking statistics about Social Enterprises – which include co-operatives, employee-owned companies, mutuals, charities and other such organisations. Mark’s team alone support 100s of traditional and social businesses in Sunderland, employing 1000s of staff, mostly from deprived, high-unemployment areas. Their combined annual turnover is in the tens of millions of pounds sterling.

Across the world, the figures are even more striking. 4 in 10 residents of the USA– the world’s flagship private enterprise economy – are members of a co-operative, including 87 million people who belong to a credit union. 13% of Sweden’s GDP and 21% of Finland’s GDP are created by social enterprises. Worldwide, social enterprises employ over 100 million people with a turnover of £1.1 trillion. That’s big business.

People in the social enterprise community are – not surprisingly – passionate in focussing on the needs of their customers, or “service users”, to whom they are often providing some form of care or support. But they’re also passionate about their business model (though not all of them would call it that).

For example, Margaret Elliot told us how she first started a co-operative in Sunderland in the 1970s, a home care provider called “Little Women”. At the time, it was born of necessity: her and some friends, all mothers, needed to work; but needed to look after pre-school children too. So they started a co-operative and ran a nursery in their office premises. More than 30 years later – and now leading an organisation that is franchising itself across the UK and that employs many hundreds of people – she described social enterprise as “a bug” that people catch. She spoke of the power of giving people ownership of the organisation that they work for; and described how it focuses organisational decision making on delivering value to the end users of services.

The changes coming to local public services, social care and health are going to create a new, transactional market in which social enterprises will need to participate, and in which they’ll need to behave in some ways more like private enterprises do today. For instance, many organisations, such as social landlords, that are currently funded by regular grants, will in future have to compete for individual service delivery transactions paid for by individual end users. That’s a dramatic change; and one that will require new processes and new infrastructures that those organisations don’t have access to today.

In a world that is “digital by default”, it’s tempting to think that existing marketplaces – such as Amazon and e-Bay – provide a model that can be emulated. But the language and models of those marketplaces tend to emphasise products and cost, not what social enterprises value – the quality of outcome for the end user of a service.

For example, if you search for branded batteries in the Amazon Marketplace, you’ll find some very, very cheap batteries which have what appear to be high review ratings. If you look a bit closer, though, there are a lot of 5 star reviews that simply state “the batteries were really cheap and arrived quickly”. There are a smaller number of 1 star reviews that warn “I only used them for a week, and then they ran out. They’re obviously fakes!”.

In social care, that sort of information simply can’t be hidden at the end of such a long trail. For all its merits and success, Amazon is clearly not a market that balances economic and social outcomes in the way that Social Enterprises will need. Of course, it was never designed to be, so that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Whilst existing online marketplaces provide rich experience we can learn from, they don’t yet provide the answer.

What I’m sure will happen is that social enterprises will co-create their own markets that strike a better balance. Early examples such as “Shop 4 Support” already exist, though the social enterprises I spoke to yesterday told me that the transaction prices in that market are currently often too high for small social enterprise service providers to bear. There will be considerable challenges along the way – dealing, for instance, with managing online identities and personal data in a way that’s appropriate for sensitive services, perhaps exploiting the initiatives announced recently by the Cabinet Office and Technology Strategy Board on personal data stores and identity.

It’s going to be a period of great change; and of great innovation in the use of technology. And, I hope, of exciting new opportunities to deliver improved outcomes for Social Enterprise.

For me, this is very much part of Smarter Cities. It may not involve instrumenting physical systems such as transportation and water; and it may not in the first place require the application of big data technologies (though I think the need for them will come); but it does represent a striking change in the way city systems will work. In particular, it’s about dramatic changes in the interactions that involve some of the people who need the most help.

But if cities can repeat Mark’s success with SES in incubating successful social enterprises creating new jobs in areas of high unemployment, it’s also an opportunity for economic growth. And whilst the focus of most of this post has been on social care, that’s far from the only sector in which social enterprises are active. Lydia’s House, for example, are a co-operative in Sunderlandwho train local employees from vulnerable backgrounds to produce artistic home furnishings with potential for export from the local economy.

In a previous post, I blogged that growing city economies whilst consuming less resources was the number one concern of city leaders today. If helping people to help themselves in local communities isn’t a resource-efficient way to create value, I don’t know what is. That sounds like the sort of Smarter City we’re looking for.

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Smarter Cities: Doing More for Much Less

December 2, 2011 Leave a comment

(Photo by woodleywonderworks)

Most of my time this week was spent in two very interesting meetings. The first, on Monday, was with a team from the UK Technology Strategy Board shaping a proposal for a Technology Innovation Centre (TIC) focussing on “Future Cities” (the transcript of David Cameron’s announcement of the £200m TIC investment programme is here). The second, on Wednesday and Thursday, was the annual general meeting of SOCITM – the society of IT Managers in local government. I’ll come to the themes that meeting addressed shortly.

Before I do that: just over 2 years ago, I wrote a blog post inspired by the October 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine titled “The Folly of Growth”. That magazine – written in response to the 2008 financial crisis – challenged the assumption that the world’s economy could continue to grow at the rates it has historically. It’s basic point was that such growth simply could not continue based on the current level of environmental resource usage per dollar of GDP created, because there simply aren’t enough resources on the planet.

In Monday’s TSB meeting, representatives from Academia, City authorities, construction companies and technology companies all agreed that City leaders – both Council CEOs and elected Council leaders – had a single overriding priority: maintaining and growing their Cities’ economies, whilst using less resources to do so. Three years down the line from the New Scientist’s seminal magazine, that’s a real vindication of their thesis.

At the SOCITM AGM on Wednesday, Martin Reeves, CEO of Coventry City Council and the incoming president of SOLACE, the society of local government CEOs, gave a visionary plenary speech echoing similar themes.

Martin referred to the very, very challenging financial pressures facing local government (and all of public sector) that were magnified by George Osbourne’s Autumn Statement this week which predicted 100,000s more job losses in public sector.

But Martin said that the real priority was not dealing with cost pressure. He said that the real priority is to carry out a radical transformation of local public service delivery in support of the most challenging policy agenda we have ever seen.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

As well as the unprecedented financial pressures created by the realisation that we have long been underestimating and mis-managing risk on an international scale, we also face global competition between city economies to a previously unforeseen degree. More locally to the UK, GP commissioning, personal care budgets, open public services, “Big Society” and several other central government policy initiatives are forcing enormous changes into local public sector organisations.

The changing role of local government of Cities and Regions is, in my view, the most critical challenge we face today. City and Regional councils are not only the organisations concerned most urgently with the local business development and economic growth strategies that create employment; they are also challenged to deliver increasingly complex services to vulnerable, hard to reach communities at lower and lower cost, whilst working with an increasingly diverse base of suppliers and service providers to do so.

I personally believe that – properly and sensitively applied – technology can be a tremendous enabler of successful change in this context. But we are still in the very, very early days of understanding how to make that work, from the technology challenges of assuring identity in a world of open digital services to the financial and governance challenges associated with defining successful models for shared service delivery.

Trial and error is the only model for moving forwards with this agenda. Doing nothing is not an option – it will result in dying cities, following the unfortunate path taken byDetroit.

And no amount of analysis will reveal the “ideal” or “right” approach. We have never faced these challenges before, so there is no proven “blueprint” for success. We will only learn how to face them successfully by trying the best solutions that we can imagine; and constantly changing and adapting them according to the results that they deliver.

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Smarter Regional Priorities in Mature European Economies

November 25, 2011 2 Comments

(Photo of Sunderland Civic Centre at night by Paul Boxley)

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks thinking about “Smarter Regions”. Smarter Regions are similar to the “Smarter Cities” concept shared by IBM and many other organisations; but they’re different in one obvious way and one not-so-obvious way – particularly in mature economies such as those of Western Europe.

A lot of the focus in Smarter Cities is concerned with instrumenting and interconnecting physical systems – such as utilities, transport and buildings – with the intelligence represented by IT systems, especially operational control and decision support tools. Solutions based on those ideas can deliver tremendous benefits, such as the congestion charging system that IBM and our partners have implemented for Stockholm.

However, in European cities, the business cases for investing in such systems are complicated, to put it mildly. Transportation, utilities and buildings are often operated by private sector organisations subject to a plethora of contractual and franchise obligations and oversight regimes; whereas the benefits of such systems – for example, reduced environental impact of city systems, and reducing the barriers to economic and productivity growth – often relate to medium to long term goals of local government organisations. Those cities – such as Stockholm and London – that have made such investments tend to be driven by what could be called “survival” concerns. They have identified a clear and pressing threat to their city systems and economies – in these cases, severe traffic congestion limiting economic growth – that must be addressed.

Smarter Regions are similar to Smarter Cities in that they seek to exploit advances in our ability to integrate and analyse information from a rich variety of systems and sources. But they are different in two ways:

  • Firstly, and obviously, whilst all cities are regions, not all regions are cities. Regions are broader, more diverse economic, geographical, political and social systems.
  • Secondly, in mature economies at least, regional priorities are concerned with a different set of systems. Their priorities are often economic growth; supporting ageing populations; and reducing the cost of their administrative, financial and public service operations whilst improving the outcomes that they deliver

Examples of initiatives addressing these priorities include IBM’s work in Bolzano, Italy, providing remote home monitoring and healthcare services in sheltered accommodation; our work with Medway Youth Trust in the UK, helping them to transform youth services to a predictive, preventative model; our “Smarter Cities Challenge” project in the city of Glasgow investigating fuel poverty; the Municipal Services Cloud that IBM Research developed for the State of New York to help small councils across the State reduce costs and implement “joined-up working”; and, of course, the Cloud Computing platform that IBM and Sunderland City Council announced last week, that will be used to deliver services and capabilities to stimulate growth and innovation in the City’s economy and public services, and that I blogged about recently.

In recent years, we’ve seen terrific pressure on regional administrations in the UK driven by the overall cuts in public sector budgets. Financial pressures in the Eurozone  area create similar drivers on the continent; and in the US the rising costs to public organisations of healthcare and pension liabilities to past and current employees created by ageing populations cause huge cost pressure too.

Despite all this, global competition for private sector investment and job creation are causing regions to seek ways to invest in addressing these challenges. Slowly but surely we are learning how to build business cases to justify those investments – often based on technologies that can both reduce internal operational costs and enable improved external outcomes (see this set of examples from IBM’s customers, for example).

There’s no panacea or silver bullet here; every region is different in its economic, social, political, financial, geographic and environmental characteristics (not to mention others that I’ve forgotten). All of those have to be taken into account when constructing business cases for Smarter Regional solutions.

But I have a sense that we’ve passed a tipping point in the build-up of momentum in this area; and I think we’re going to see a lot more exciting projects and initiatives announced by Cities and Regions in Europe over the next year.

It’s a great time to be a technologist working in local government.

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Building a Smarter City on the Cloud in Sunderland

November 18, 2011 11 Comments

(Photo by Mrs Logic)

It’s been a great week. IBM and Sunderland City Council jointly announced a deal we agreed recently to build a Cloud Computing platform for the City (here’s IBM’s press release, and here’s the Council’s). I was part of the team that wrote IBM’s proposal, and am now excited to be working closely with the Council to help them deliver the benefits we both envisage coming from their investment.

The press release describes several ways in which Sunderland intend to exploit the Cloud to stimulate innovation and growth in business and public services in the city. How I hope to help them do that on IBM’s part is by exploiting our experiences working with clients around the world on “Smarter City” engagements.

For example, I was lucky enough earlier this year to meet the New York Conference of Mayors and the team in IBM Research led by David Cohn and Juhnyoung Lee that delivered the “Municipal Shared Services Cloud” for City and Town Councils in the State. In that project IBM helped some very small local authorities (looking after towns with just 20,000 inhabitants, for example) to integrate data between different business systems in a very cost effective way, achieving “joined up working” cost and outcome benefits that had previously been beyond their reach. It’s that sort of experience and expertise that we hope to apply in Sunderland to help the City meet its goals as laid out in their Economic Masterplan.

I’ve already met with some of the other stakeholders in the city, such as Sustainable Enterprise Strategies, who support local social enterprises, and are building a fantastic new “container city” incubation facility from re-purposed shipping containers. We’re hoping to hold a workshop with the organisations they support very shortly.

It’s probably the most enjoyable and rewarding project I’ve worked on in many years for IBM; and Sunderland is a city with a lot of exciting plans. As The Register noted, for example, the Cloud builds on Sunderland’s recent announcement that they’ll soon be the first city in the country with complete superfast Broadband coverage.

Everyone I’ve told about the project has immediately caught the enthusiasm we have about working with Sunderland; and a quick search of “Sunderland Cloud” on Google or Twitter shows that the story is spreading like wildfire in the twittersphere too.

I’m looking forward to spending as much time as possible in the North East for the foreseeable future!

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