IBM Software Government

Planning and design forsmarter cities

2 Planning and design for smarter cities

Infusing intelligence into the way citiesworkThe interconnected nature of people, resources and environ-ments is driving a revolution in how and where people live. By2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70 percent of theEarth’s total population1—or 6.4 billion people—equal toadding seven New Yorks to the planet annually.

To attract the best and brightest citizens and businesses, which bring the flow of economic capital, cities must competeagainst each other in traditional areas such as education facilities, services and transportation systems—as well as lessconventional areas, such as exuding a vibe of success andsophistication. The convergence of culture and commercearound cities brings great promise for creating a smartercity—maximizing economic, cultural, engineering and scien-tific impacts on the world while minimizing ecologicalimpacts. Yet on the road to smarter cities, leaders must makemany choices and decisions, sometimes without fully under-standing the effects on the environment, citizens and culture.

Achieving a balanced and sustainableoutcomeThis high rate of urbanization is both an emblem of our eco-nomic and societal progress and a huge strain on the planet’sinfrastructure. Mayors, heads of economic development,school administrators, police chiefs and other civic leaders facechallenges in educating the young; keeping citizens safe andhealthy; attracting and facilitating commerce; and enabling thesmooth flow of planes, trains, cars and pedestrians—all whiledealing with a global economic downturn.

To successfully execute the concept of smarter cities as thenew hub of commerce and culture, business and governmentleaders must develop ground-up opportunities and revitalizeexisting cities with new ideas and innovations while leveraging

Public safety

City governance

Transportation

City strategy

Services

Telecommunications

Energy and utilitiesEducation

Healthcare

Figure 1: Rational solutions help leaders plan and deliver smarter cities byaligning city, business and citizen interests and by prioritizing investmentswith the ability to govern execution.

local best practices to create economies of scale that connectregionally and nationally. Attaining these goals involves ana-lyzing economic, organizational and ecological challenges andrecognizing trade-offs required to successfully achieve a bal-anced and sustainable outcome.

Specifically, city leaders are dealing with a number of challenges:

● Aging infrastructure and assets—As the average age of acity’s systems and infrastructure rises, the inability to iden-tify total cost of ownership (TCO) drives overinvestmentand risk (sometimes physical). Investing in newer technolo-gies is often more expensive than updating existing systems.

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● Limited budget growth—As costs increase, local receiptsand aid packages stay stagnant. The expanding role andvoice of constituents with divergent needs create even morerequests for limited funds. While opportunities exist tostreamline and downsize assets and asset management, part-nerships may be more realistic than privatization.

● Agency independency and misalignment—Collaborationis key, but many cities have duplicate processes that drivecostly, suboptimal outcomes and make investment decisionsthat ignore synergies and differences. Failure to poolresources and collaborate for new funds affects top and bot-tom lines.

● Demand for greater transparency and accountability—Public officials and their partners need to reduce risks associated with larger projects, especially to satisfy multiplestakeholders. Complexity inherent in gaining a competitiveadvantage drives project risk, and the sheer volume of infor-mation and decision impacts are becoming unmanageable.

● Pressure to innovatively use technology to solve issuesand drive alignment—Smarter city constituents expect city leaders to use IT to achieve cost-efficient and effectiveproject outcomes that deliver key online services, streamlinecollaboration across project partners and reduce risks associ-ated with solving complex systems problems.

● Mandates to manage security and compliance—To betterdeliver city services and work with external partners, citiesmust approach and design solutions that create security-richenvironments and facilitate compliance. Regulatory and riskissues, including data security and privacy, are critical, andmissteps are costly.

Intelligent solutions for smarter citiesInnovation starts with the ability to understand current challenges, opportunities and inhibitors to transformation andcreating a road map to achieve the ultimate vision. Many cities

Programs Client organizations

Services

Accomplish

Authority

Outcomes and impacts

Outputs

Governance

Deliver

Used in

Processes

Resources

Individual clients

Provider organizations

Roles

Accountability

Responsibility

Figure 2: Leveraging best practices and business-process-driven reference models, successful cities have designed services delivery around citizen valueand reduced execution risk.

4 Planning and design for smarter cities

struggle with the massive complexity of the issues they faceand cannot effectively break down problems to see the realroadblocks. As a result, city leaders make decisions to satisfyshort-term requirements, spending scarce capital that is criti-cal to solving larger, more significant problems. To build asmarter city and advance the city agenda, leaders need a cohe-sive set of capabilities that helps bring business and technologyleaders together, clarify stakeholders’ priorities and investmentpotential, and create collaborative partnerships.

IBM Rational® solutions for smarter cities combine mission-critical planning, alignment and execution capabilities withbest-practice assets, processes, practices and services to helpalign the varying needs of internal and external players. Citiescan make faster, better-informed strategic and tactical deci-sions that drive realization and help maintain existing servicelevels. IBM has identified four core-competency areas thatform the foundation of a smarter city.

Define and prioritize city initiativesCities must make smarter cost–benefit analyses to prioritizeinitiatives that best create citizen value and support the munic-ipal vision. It’s important to capture the current state of cityservices and infrastructure—a system of systems—and evaluatethe transformation required. By thinking in terms of a citizen-centered model, city leaders can establish decision processesthat analyze the value of opportunities and result in a collabo-rative process that focuses on maximizing value, minimizingtrade-offs and capturing the city vision.

With competing interests for limited funds, it’s critical thatcities evaluate new and existing services, infrastructure andcapabilities against the priorities of citizens, communities and

businesses to spark growth, innovation and progress. After cityleaders make decisions, they must manage, monitor and ana-lyze investments to ensure that key initiatives drive measurableoutcomes.

IBM Rational software solutions can help cities evolve fromtheir current states to an improved future state by prioritizinginitiatives into a pragmatic plan and by using technology tohelp manage complexity and identify impacts, costs and risks.Cities can craft a living map of the city and its partnershipsand automate data collection and analysis of potential fundinginitiatives against critical decision criteria. With Rational soft-ware, city leaders can create scenarios and models to visualizethe effects of investments on requirements, finances, time andcitizens.

By capturing and organizing priorities and constraints of allconstituents; analyzing current opportunities against futurescenarios; and matching limited funding with high-priority,high-return and low-risk investments, cities can establish atransparent and inclusive decision process that promotes effec-tive analysis and management of limited resources and thathelps ensure fiscal responsibility and auditability.

Design innovative citizen-centered solutionsTo evolve into a smarter city, a city needs an optimized blue-print and road map that allows municipal leaders to view citysystems that connect all elements, including infrastructure,processes, services and information, and stakeholder needs andmotivations. Armed with this comprehensive view, city leaderscan develop and analyze future-state scenarios that uncoverthe true consequences of change; better predict the effect on

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Figure 3: Managing execution of smarter city investments requires a single view of current and in-flight investments to help ensure fiscal responsibility andsocial impact.

and risk across systems and stakeholders; and identify oppor-tunities to streamline, modernize and eliminate redundancywhile maintaining services quality. Removing the complexityaround a city’s system of systems and connecting the compo-nents of a smarter city allow leaders to reduce the effects ofchange across systems and lay the groundwork for longer-termeconomic growth and reduced costs.

With a blueprint to envision current and future states—including risks that may not be apparent when looking atorganizational capabilities separately—leaders can model cityprocesses, services and technologies to define the achievable

state that balances city effectiveness. Deep systems analysescapabilities also help cities identify opportunities to morequickly realize value, reduce costs and improve risk manage-ment associated with ongoing transformation.

Rational software solutions help business and technology lead-ers more easily understand and analyze the interdependentnature of a city’s system of systems so they can make faster,better-informed strategic and tactical decisions; increase effi-ciency; and free up capital through consolidation.

6 Planning and design for smarter cities

Figure 4: In today’s city, optimal investments require prioritization processes that balance the economic, environmental, political and social benefits to thecity and its constituents.

Deliver citizen-centered solutions fasterAccelerating project implementations involves identifying andleveraging best practices and automation to drive collabora-tion across organizational boundaries. To ensure successfulproject execution, cities need to define and manage require-ments and connect them through model-driven developmentsolutions built on best practices and approaches.

With integrated life-cycle delivery solutions, city leaders can build consensus and speed development using a single,integrated environment and common metamodels that helpdefine program, service and process requirements as well as

associated architectural models. Taking advantage of struc-tures, approaches, requirements and models built on the expe-rience of other cities provides a solid foundation that can becustomized to help align IT implementation and acceleratedelivery through automation.

Rational software solutions can help leaders more productivelydeliver city services by connecting the dots between businessand technical stakeholders and by automating deliveryprocesses through best practices and a collaborative, instru-mented software delivery platform.

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Protect city applicationsA smarter city interacts with citizens and stakeholders throughmultiple channels and must anticipate and prevent—not justrespond to—security breaches to applications and infrastruc-ture. It’s challenging to simultaneously deploy security-richsolutions for citizens and protect critical city data and applica-tions. To effectively manage web application vulnerabilitiesthat threaten citizens and cities and increase the level of per-sonalized services, cities must perform the following tasks:

● Centralize security and compliance requirements● Automate vulnerability discovery and compliance analysis● Embed security testing across the development life cycle to

identify and mitigate security risks before they become anissue

With a comprehensive security and compliance solution, citiescan reduce risk and provide consistent security managementwhile increasing security professionals’ productivity and effec-tiveness. IBM Rational solutions for web application securitycan help cities automate web vulnerability and complianceanalysis processes and focus on a single source of truth forsecurity and compliance requirements. Cities gain the abilityto protect critical data and infrastructure and enable citizensand city stakeholders to transact and interact online with confidence.

Building smarter cities

● The City of Copenhagen uses Rational software to prioritize projects on a strategic level and evaluate theirstrategic contribution as well as to quickly access infor-mation on the implementation and progress of individualinitiatives.

● The Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA) ofCanada leverages IBM solutions to create and share abest-practices model of the business of government. Bycollaborating around a common reference model (taxon-omy, processes, etc.), municipalities can better alignresources and translate agency objectives into the bestplan of action.

● The City of Babcock Ranch in Florida is aligning with IBM to build the world’s smartest city from the ground up in its quest to build its city system of systems anddeliver net-positive environmental impact by leveragingRational software to prioritize partners, projects and sys-tem investments.

● One of the largest community-owned electric utilities inthe United States worked with IBM to create one of thefirst intelligent utility networks in that country—enablingthe utility to centrally manage, monitor and control itssmart grid for 1 million consumers and 43,000 businesses.

Please Recycle

Start smart with IBM Rational solutionsHeading into the twenty-first century, a city’s growth, eco-nomic value and competitive differentiation will increasinglyderive from people, skills, creativity and knowledge—and theability to create and absorb innovation. When a city can suc-cessfully apply advanced IT, analytics and systems thinking tocreate a more citizen-centered services approach and buildbetter industry partnerships, it can effectively attract, create,enable, harness and retain citizens’ skills, knowledge and cre-ativity. With IBM Rational solutions, cities and their partnersare merging physical and digital assets in an interconnectedand intelligent way to create a citizen-centered approach andmake the smarter city vision a reality.

For more informationTo find out how you can put IBM Rational software and solu-tions for smarter cities to work to your advantage, contactyour IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/government

Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financingcan enable effective cash management, protection from tech-nology obsolescence, improved total cost of ownership andreturn on investment. Also, our Global Asset RecoveryServices help address environmental concerns with new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more information onIBM Global Financing, visit: ibm.com/financing

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1 UN-HABITAT, “3 million people per week added to cities of developingworld according to UN-HABITAT’s new State of the World’s Cities2008/9: Harmonious Cities,” news release, http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/presskitsowc2008/PR%202.pdf

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