IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC), produced in association with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), took place in Barcelona on 3-5 October 2017. At the conference, Jim Morrish of Huawei participated in a panel focussing on Empowering Smart City Managers and Smart City Entrepreneurs. This is a brief summary of the discussion.

By Jim Morrish

Participants:
• Jim Morrish (Chief IoT Solution Consultant, Europe Region, Huawei)
• Ulrich Ahle (CEO FIWARE Foundation)
• David Aimson (Strategic Business Planning & Commercial Development, Buckinghamshire County Council)
• Mika Rasinkangas (VP, Business Development InterDigital Communications, Inc.)
• Arty Chandra (Sr. Director, InterDigital) [Moderator]

IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC), produced in association with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), took place in Barcelona on 3-5 October 2017. At the conference, Jim Morrish of Huawei participated in a panel focussing on Empowering Smart City Managers and Smart City Entrepreneurs. This is a brief summary of the discussion.

The panel was opened with a discussion of the benefits of Public Private Partnerships in the Smart Cities space, including the access that such approaches can provide to funding and innovation.

The panel then moved to a discussion of the overall challenges of and requirements for Smart Cities projects. The view of the panel was that much of the challenge associated with smart cities projects related to financial and political barriers. Even when smart city solution use cases were compelling (for instance, a cost saving of up to 80% was mentioned in respect of smart lighting solutions that also include the swap over from sodium lighting to LED lighting), often there were political blocks to overcome. Such blocks could be associated with electoral cycles (and the need for mayoral incumbents to deliver benefits within their elected term) or to do with a lack of clear decision-making responsibility or budget and operational fragmentation between different ‘levels’ of city and regional administrations.

One approach that was suggested was to use certain ‘anchor projects’ to propel the overall adoption of IIoT technologies in cities. For instance, a smart lighting solution could potentially also provide the communications and other infrastructure needed to support other smart cities applications such as connected refuse-bin monitoring and optimised collection, or smart parking, or smart traffic control. An effective strategy can be to implement such an ‘anchor’ project, so improving the business case associated with any downstream IIoT projects and also the ease of implementing such projects.

The panel then focussed briefly on standards in smart cities. FIWARE has developed to the point where it is a standard that has been adopted by ‘hundreds’ of smart cities projects, and seems to have real momentum. There is significant benefit in the adoption of standards in a smart cities context, since many smart cities projects are broadly similar between different cities. For example, a smart street lighting solution in The Hague won’t be much different to a smart lighting solution in Barcelona. Accordingly it makes sense to develop solutions once, and deploy in multiple locations. Standards like FIWARE enable this overall approach, and also enable scale benefits within the overall marketplace.

The panel concluded with each panellist providing their view of what advice they would offer to any city considering the adoption of IIoT technologies. The responses included references to standards, specification and deployment of comprehensive solutions, anchor projects, integrated platforms and also potentially initially focussing on key (isolated) priority solutions to get the overall adoption of IIoT within cities moving.

One key observation was the IIoT is only one aspect of Information Technology, albeit a very significant aspect, and one that will encompass all of IT in the medium term. The approach to the adoption of IIoT within a city should therefore be couched in terms of the adoption of Information Technology as a whole. And cities should be clear that IT is only one of the levers that they have available to achieve their defined strategic plans, with other levers including for example taxation and investment in shared infrastructures, etc. Accordingly, the delivery of a cities’ strategic plan should be the first priority, and city administrations should consider the use of IT and IIoT only where these concepts support the delivery of the overall strategic plan.

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Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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