New York, May 29, 2014: Three global cities, Minneapolis and Minnesota in the United States of America, and Montpellier in France will now work with IBM to make data-driven decisions which eventually will transform the way they provide water, transportation and emergency management in the future.
Announcing this, IBM said in a press statement that these and other cities around the world were increasingly using data to make better decisions and allocate resources to sense and respond to challenges in city infrastructure. From improving traffic management, responding rapidly to incidents, using effective communication channels with citizens and ensuring sustainable natural resources, data and analytics were providing new insight to create more effective cities.
IBM hs been working with cities globally, helping city administrations to use advanced technologies like analytics, to help identify ways to tackle urbanisation challenges, improve sustainability and deliver better services for their citizens.
The company said it had isolated “the most pressing challenges” and was bringing together a new way to help municipalities use Big Data and analytics via the Cloud to improve economics and address the strategic issues that were critical to their future.
For the three cities now joining the IBM smart city network, the availability of Smarter Cities management centers for transportation, water and emergency management will serve as a springboard for development to allow the cities to quickly begin to use their own data, as well as open data. For citizens, on the other hand, this means improved access to city services, the ability to predict and respond to situations before they impact the daily lives of people, and enabling better feedback to empower citizens.
Otto Doll, Chief Information Officer, City of Minneapolis, said, “For the first time, we have the tools that can be applied broadly across city departments to give us greater flexibility to see reality and turn data into decisions. In any city, an issue may reside in one department, but the answer lies in another. Analytics can enable a city to tell meaningful stories about what is going on in real-time through data.”
The Minneapolis civic administration will be using IBM’s Cloud-based Smarter Cities technology to make more effective decisions, allocate city resources more efficiently and drive change by ensuring multiple departments were aligned and working together on a single initiative. IBM Intelligent Operations software will also help the city do pattern discovery, and providing city leaders with metrics to track performance improvement and ensure they are meeting their goals.
In Montpellier, the fastest growing city in France, IBM Intelligent Operations delivered via the Cloud serves as the foundation for the city’s effort to improve water management, mobility and emergency management.
Montpellier is also creating a living laboratory for open innovation in cooperation with the University of Montpellier 1 and University of Montpellier 2, encouraging the development of new technology, urban innovations, new start-up organizations and the exploration of new economic models. These efforts have already resulted in a 10 percent improvement in water yield, and future goals are to reduce flooding by 20 percent and reduce automobile traffic by 10 percent through a partnership with leading French public transportation provider Transdev. Montpellier plans to achieve these goals while keeping up with growing demands on city services.
According to Michael Dixon, General Manager, IBM Smarter Cities, cities and towns needed a foundation for modernising their systems and the basis of their technology should be flexible, open and easy to use.
New initiative
Meanwhile, IBM also announced today a new digital platform for citizen engagement. People for Smarter Cities will provide citizens, academia and forward thinkers around the world a place to share ideas and engage in public discussions on how to make cities smarter. To mark the launch of People for Smarter Cities, IBM has collaborated with Zooppa, a crowdsourcing community with more than 200,000 members—including filmmakers, influential bloggers, and environmental communities—- to invite citizens from around the world to submit their ideas through video on ways to improve life in their cities. The winning Smarter Cities videos can be viewed at people4smartercities.com.
Image Credit: IBM
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