There continues to be significant hype surrounding smart cities. In reality, many cities are in the early process of becoming smarter, but cities need to overcome a range of challenges if they are to be truly smart.
Three significant challenges in developing smart city IoT applications
1. Business Case
Smart city solutions promise to offer solutions to specific problems as well as broader socio-economic and environmental benefits. These benefits can be difficult to define, quantify, and achieve. City leaders pay much attention to the business case, as this is typically how they evaluate for example, IT solutions. A straightforward solution, such as intelligent street lighting or waste management, will have a clearer return on investment. Achieving less tangible and quantifiable benefits can prove difficult to demonstrate and so come with a higher risk of not gaining sufficient support.
2. Scaling Up
Scaling up to a full smart city solution from a pilot or demonstrator trial is often difficult. A city may have received funding from central government or other bodies to set up trials and demonstration projects but transitioning to a full implementation requires significant planning and investment, and a robust business case. It is often the case that smart city solutions span multiple city administration departments and convincing these departments to participate (and fund) can be difficult.
3. Integrating legacy systems
Cities, like enterprises, face issues in managing a mix of legacy systems and applications alongside new technologies. Our recent CSP survey showed that some of the largest challenges that larger enterprises face concerns the technical ability to integrate legacy systems and Smart City projects will face similar issues.
Three significant opportunities to drive successful smart city IoT applications
1. Engagement
Engagement with citizens is fundamental to the success of a smart city implementation. It takes time to understand the groups that the solution will target and to educate and encourage them on how to use it. Many more successful solutions are designed with the citizen at its heart where they co-creators of the service.
Successful engagement will be underpinned by:
· Wide availability
· An application that delivers real benefits with well-designed functionality
· High awareness amongst the target audience
2. UX driven innovation
One of the biggest drivers of IoT applications in the enterprise is to improve their customer experience, and hence build usage, loyalty, and brand values, and the same will hold true for these customers when they interact with a smart city application.
Some of these will require a customer interface of some sort, and there is a major opportunity to think about innovative, effective UX design that will really drive usage and positive feedback.
3. Leverage of IoT connectivity developments
Smart City IoT developments can leverage a wide range of connectivity options. A key consideration, now seen in a number of recent studies, is the rise of 5G connectivity as application leapfrog from older 2G and 3G connectivity solutions straight to 5G.
However, as with all IoT, there is always a need to match current and future connectivity demands to available technology (bearing in mind all the other caveats such as cost, longevity, and ease of upgrade).
Successful smart city implementations have often overcome many of these issues by creating a dedicated team that can develop new processes and operating methods and that has the authority to challenge and change existing practices.
Becoming a smarter city is a complex undertaking and requires tenacity to achieve the objectives of the proposed solution and to overcome the challenges and barriers. The potential upside is significant and successful smart cities are already reaping the rewards.
Contact TecFutures to see our 2023 IoT Market Outlook report or to speak to us about how we can help with IoT custom research and analysis.