London as a Digital City

London's FinTech position is widely known with the overal ecosystem for start up digital innovators leading Europe. Most pundits don't see this changing too much post Brexit, whatever the consequences of negotiation between Britain and the EU. However, that is a European position and many other cities have aspirations in this area,whist at the same time within the UK Birmingham and Manchester are begining to grow critical mass within their digital ecosystems too.

Singapore and Hong Kong are showing stron signs of trying to build strong ecosystems around Block Chain (see previous posts). But this week, Telangana (the southern Indian State with Hyderbad at the centre of its IT prowess) announced a partnership with Tech Mahindra to launch a "Blockchain District" as a technology park for incubating blockchain technology and applications.

Interestingly, The smart City Index ranking of global smart cities, shows London in 12th place, just behind Singapore and just ahead of New York, San Fransisco and Chicago. So there is a lot to do if London is going to achieve its Mayor's and the UK government's aspiration that it will be the leading Smart City in the world.

Given the fact that Smart Cities are an extended affair, reaching far beyond the borders of the city environs into a connected network of outlying areas, it will be interesting to see whether it attempts to partner with other cities in the UK to build a networked system, where the cobination of the cities is stronger than the sum of their parts.

So at this point there's loads of competition and everything to play for if London is going to fulfil its aspirations or fall behind, as so often in the past when the UK has held an initial strong leading position. This needs both political will and finance industry recognition of how wealth is actually created and sustained.

Moscow Goes IoT whilst Businesses Struggle with Digital Culture

The City of Moscow recently announced that it had started to manage the operations of its whole fleet of 22,000 vehicles using a mixture of IoT and Machine Learning to optimise deployments for both effect and efficiency. This covers everthing from refuse trucks to snow plows. Efficincy savings of something live 9M roubles per month are now being claimed or roughtly £150,000. At the same time it meant that Moscos coped admirably with the recent extreme snow conditions, keeping the city moving with knock on gains to the lives and economic benefits of the local community. This is a good case study for Smart Cities.

At the same time, the digital work is throwing up whole new social and quasi religous groups such as the Kult of Kek and Witchblr. These groups have their own approaches to changing a frustrating world, but represent powerful pressure groups whose influence on things like social choice and consumer behaviour is leveraged well beyond their actual membership. They are however, non conformist and totally confusing to the pre-millenial generation, fusing a whole set of religious, game and folk themes with strong political messages and a dash of geek humour.

Little wonder then that a recent survey (by Virtusa and Forrester) show that 85% of businesses have digital plans, but many don't really know what to do next. They have not really grasped the principles or developped the capabilities to pursue their agenda. So they are not yet prepared for the fact that Digital makes access and on boarding of customers easier, but businesses can no longer rely on 75% of business being from repeat customers, unless as I pointed out in The Way of DAU they adapt to relentless renewal and re-invention and manage their ethical stance to keep their brand shiny and clean.

Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.

Redefining Performance with Smart Cities

One of the key things that a successful Digital Business Needs to Do is to identify meaningful Strategic KPIs which focus on value based outcomes for both it and its customers. Then all opportunities and activities should address how they move KPI scores in the right direction.

Traditional metrics such as revenue, productivity and profit tend to miss the mark. If they don't include customer experience and quality based aspects, e.g. Customer orders shipped correctly within N hours, then they are unlikely to drive improvement and sustainable growth of the enterprise.

This lesson is beginning to be learnt even in the area of Smart Cities where to date the focus has been more driven by what the technology could do and arbirary efficiency measures than providing better value to local residents.

However, Barcelona, one of Europe's leading cities for technology adoption, has started to put citizens first. In the words of Barcelona's CTO and Digital Commissioner, "we reversed the paradignm completely". Barcelona now puts citizens needs and policy objectives first. The city is also focusing on aligning data capture and information with these needs, for better informed decision making.

On the other side of the globe, in Adelaide, the CIO's team interviewed citizens and created an "emotional storyboard" to present to city leaders before agreeing objectives for their initiative.

At the same time, in America city administrations pursuing a Smart City approach have also learnt about the need to be collaborative as witnessed in recent comments from the CTO for Washington DC. "Being Collaborative is the hardest thing to do".

Whilst here in the UK, Huawei rates Bristol as the Leading City in Smart City implementation out of 20 assessed. Bristol's approach has been 3 pronged based on:

• Collaboration not just within the council but with partners and industry sectors;
• Community engagement to keep citizens central to the value of investments;
• Keeping it real so that value and savings are balanced, enabling further improvements.