In announcing the partnership, the company’s CEO declared that “the network has become the new utility.”
Saudi Arabia has already asked Cisco to help plan four new cities of its own, and China is estimated to need at least 500 to house its growing population.
With companies literally building cities around their products, the prospect is emerging that the world could someday be divided between IBM cities and Cisco cities, just as commercials have told consumers they are either Macs or PCs.
Mr. Katz doesn’t think that would be so bad, and said one alternative – that cities don’t upgrade their information systems at all – is even worse.
“It’s not a question of whether or not firms are going to reap the benefits, the real issue for me is how fast can this be adopted,” Mr. Katz said.
Chris Moore, Edmonton’s chief information officer, was responsible for the city’s winning bid to become an IBM Smarter City and agrees that most municipalities have no choice but to upgrade. Right now, he said, Edmonton employs 1,100 different types of software, making effective data sharing within the city virtually impossible.
“For me, if you put it all in an enterprise system it’s going to be easier and faster,” he said.
The results of streamlining data have already been made apparent in several Canadian cities. A data analytics program adopted by the Edmonton police allowed for crime statistics to be studied in real time, which the force credits with producing an 18-per-cent drop in crime.
“Before we used manual processes, and if you could look at data from a month ago that would be a good thing,” said Staff Sergeant John Warden, who led the program. “Now we can deploy resources to hot spots immediately.”
In Cambridge, the city government has applied the same principle to studying its pipes, roads and other physical assets.
It paid IBM a million dollars to implement a software program that would allow it to better understand the Ontario city’s $2-billion infrastructure assets, monitoring everything from trip hazards in sidewalks to leaks in underground pipes. Mike Hausser, the city’s manager of asset management, said he modeled his program on the operating systems of most Fortune 500 companies.
“It’s not just a matter of making a capital investment, producing something – you had to produce it at the right cost. If you weren’t able to do that in a private-sector business, you weren’t successful. You went out of business very quickly,” he said. “Municipal governments are in the same situation.”
Officials paid for the new technology through federal gas tax funding, and believe it will help them more efficiently plan for future infrastructure projects. Their water system, for example, is now monitored by robotic cameras, which report problems into a centralized database. In the future, this could mean the difference between replacing one pipe, and replacing all of them.
Bruce Ross, president of IBM Canada, said that introducing this kind of efficiency will be the way cities of the future set themselves apart.
“Why replace a mile of pipe when you can replace 30 feet?” he said. “That level of information is there, you just need the right level of analytics on top of it.”
And he doesn’t think cities of the future will be categorized by the type of software they use, but by how they choose to employ it.
“I think you’ll find that cities will be more solution-oriented. So you’ll find one city that provides extremely good customer service and another that becomes incredibly eco-friendly,” he said. “Cities will be differentiated not by the technology they have but by the solutions they provide.”
