The term “smart city” is generally used to refer to an urban area where technology and data are used to improve services to its citizens.
Smart cities start with people, not technology, said Jeremy Goldberg, Microsoft’s global director of critical public sector infrastructure. For smart cities to be successful, we need to worry less about adopting technology for technology’s sake and instead focus more on the impact it can have on real people.
To deliver on the promise of smart cities and to build trust with the people who use their services, Goldberg believes that city leaders need to return their priorities to data. For smart cities to be successful, they have to meet the needs of city dwellers and enable a more comfortable urban life, he further added. One way to do this is to understand how people actually live and use urban spaces so that policies and technology have a positive impact.
However, priorities change from person to person, for example “Lifelong City dwellers” or those who have lived in a city for a long time already have a good understanding of the landscape and want their daily activities to be easy and predictable as possible.
Goldberg believes managing directors, on the other hand, want to reach customers easily and run smoothly. This can mean anything from solutions that make delivery easier to better public transportation systems that help people get around.
And then there are those who want to move to the city from another place. What things are important to someone who wants to move to a new city? The answer to this question can include access to services, easy-to-understand road and transport systems, minimal congestion and the total cost of living.
Goldberg also suggests that cities can better meet the needs of their citizens by improving the delivery of their services. That means both direct interaction with residents when they provide services and the way in which they improve operational efficiency in the backend, he explains. Most residents will only notice these improvements in their interactions with these services, but backend efficiency means smoother operations and lower costs, which translates into better overall management.
Data sharing is one way to add to this efficiency achieve, says Goldberg. Improving a government’s ability to collaborate and share information between agencies can reduce duplication of costs and burdens, and can improve and simplify the experience for residents.
But how do city guides facilitate this data exchange? Authorities need to adapt policies and practices to actually use the data they collect if they want to improve operations, Goldberg says. Elected leaders need to commit to an evidence-based approach that draws insights from data to guide their priorities and projects.
At the same time, as personal data drives the transformation of smart cities, urban decision-makers must prioritize protecting security and privacy. The new infrastructure must support the collection and analysis of anonymized data to ensure that the public is confident that their data is not being misused or shared, Goldberg suggested.
This is where Microsoft and its partners come into play, especially when it comes to service delivery and transparency. Not only do people need to be told that their privacy is being protected, but they also need to experience it and actively participate in it.
One example comes from Estonia, which did its best to build trust between the public sector and its citizens by implementing digital services and successfully encouraging people to use them, according to an article published by Estonian World in June 2020 entitled The right mix: How Estonia ensures privacy and access to electronic services in the digital age, the country has created an environment for electronic services that has “clear and well-established legal parameters for the protection of personal data, an independent enforcement mechanism for these parameters and one of the highest Internet standards. Penetration rates in the world “coordinated world”, which “provides a model for nations trying to expand ego governance”.
Goldberg believes this is a clear example of data protection that is ingrained in a government’s will to create and maintain this type of system. Microsoft can provide public sector partners with the technology they need to give people this level of visibility, but ultimately they need to adopt the guidelines to make sure they are implemented and used correctly.
Governments also need to improve service delivery if they are to build trust among their citizens. Many people don’t trust government institutions to serve them well, says Goldberg. Government agencies have often struggled to provide services because of inadequate policies, processes, and technology. And when they do, they often do it slowly and with administrative burdens that make those services difficult to use.
Microsoft can provide technology on both sides to counter this, he says. In the backend, we can enable better policy implementation through better software development operations like GitHub. And on the front end we are providing the infrastructure necessary for more stable resident-facing experiences, such as the cloud.
The need for better accessibility and digital integration underpins much of our efforts in the technology industry. City life is known to be fast paced and challenging, especially for those who are economically or socially in difficulty. Technology needs to improve the government’s ability to help people, Goldberg says. That means it should be used to improve the urban infrastructure they use every day, as well as social services. Too often it has gone in the opposite direction, creating a digital divide that has prevented the people who need it most from having easy access to that help, and that is something we humans by nature need to change. In many cases, they were built to suit a specific capable sub-group of society.
Microsoft is the organization works to address the challenges of elderly, visually impaired and physically disabled citizens through their active participation in the World Economic Forum and its accessibility initiatives. The organization is also part of the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs, a project to promote human rights with disabilities in the digital age.
