IBM has relaunched it's Smarter City initiative and the website portal is something you should visit to experience. It is truly an immersive, interactive experience designed to show how cities all over the world are using advanced technology to help address some of the biggest problems facing our planet.
It is a fact...our cities are getting larger and larger. With that growth comes significant challenges for city leaders. Increasingly, city operations are being digitized, creating brand new data points. With the greater digitization of its core systems and the use of advanced analytic capabilities, cities can enhance decision-making and improve urban planning.
The Smarter City portal allows you to explore and experience how Smarter Technology can have an impact on making a city more sustainable, more intelligent, and simply better places to live and work. At the portal, you have options to learn more about how technology can impact all areas of a Smarter City, including Transportation (all forms of transportation), Public Safety, Communications, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Social Services, Education, Retail, Economic Development and other critical operations that make up a large urban city today.
I suggest you give it a visit and explore this innovative portal at www.thesmartercity.com
I think that the initiative isn’t only about traffic alerts to commuters; it is more about an extension of a city-wide/regional traffic management system. Smarter Traveler is designed, I understand, to interface with a city-scale traffic management system. It’s as much about helping transport managers deal with multi-modal congestion, as it is about recommending alternate ways to work during rush hour.
The PPP question is a big topic and something I’m going to write about in the near future. But, a big barrier centers on trust: Government trusting business to advance the governance mandate; business trusting government to let it do them do their jobs without stifling oversight. Modern business models and technology are better able to preserve trust than older models, and outsourcing has validated PPPs to some extent. Government is motivated to look for help in today’s atmosphere of austerity, and will enter into PPPs, as long as they can trust the private entity to whom they will transfer some measure of authority.
Posted by: GaryHerndon | February 07, 2012 at 12:47 AM
Are navigation apps that show real-time traffic conditions on mobile phones or GPS devices removing the need for initiatives like this? I already have a free map/traffic app showing congestion on my Android.
If not, what are the biggest barriers to developing such public-private partnerships? The lack of regional coordination of transportation in the U.S.? The sluggish and politically-charged government procurement process?
Posted by: Ryan Maccarty | September 04, 2012 at 01:13 AM