4 STEPS TO BECOMING A TOP SMART-CITY STRATEGIST

Arvind Varshney
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

Have you ever felt annoyed by endless discussions over a new kind of city everyone is going gaga over — the smart city?

You know so much about cities. You’ve lived in them all your life. You’ve probably planned and designed parts of them. You might be managing city services like water supply or traffic. You might be responsible for policy formulation for the development of a city. Yet when it comes to smart cities the world seems to be going past without you being a part of it. Or if you ARE part of a smart city team, you are not sure if you’re doing everything right, and leveraging it to enhance your career in the best possible way. If it seems like you, read on.

A huge opportunity for urban professionals but no takers

The world has become agog with the news of smart city announcements. The Indian media and local governments have gone into a tizzy after the announcement of 100 smart cities programme by Government of India (GoI). Several other countries like Australia and America have announced their own ‘smart cities’ programmes. Several other countries are pursuing development of smart cities as a default approach without much whistles and bells. The global smart city market has quickly grown and is estimated in trillions of dollars over next few years (not decades!).

With such a huge amount at stake, countries all around the world are clamouring to claim a piece in the pie. National governments are running campaigns to get more than their business-feet in the door where ever they can. Industries across all sectors — transport, energy, health, construction — of all denominations are rushing in to sell their wares and services, all with the tag ‘smart’!

It has generated more confusion and will very likely result in a haphazard implementation of ‘smart’ solutions which may be very expensive to fix later.

In this scenario urban professionals — urban designers, planners, policy-makers, landscape architects, urban managers, IT professionals, local government managers — need to take the lead to obviate the chances of an indifferent, unsustainable, undesirable urban environment taking place. It’s their professional obligation. Social and moral too. It’s a perfect situation for them to walk in and sort the confusion out. And in the process acquire recognition and make some money.

What urban professionals can do

n my last post CRACKING THE SMART CITY CODE, I talked about three kinds of strategies to capture opportunities that smart cities offer which will best suit your mindset, knowledge and skills. They are:

1. a strategy for your career

2. another one to establish 2-way communication with stake holders, potential clients and employers; and

3. the third one for cities-how they can transition to being smart.

In this post, I start with the 3rd one first and share with you a four part simple template you can use to create smart city strategy for an existing urban area.

A template for a smart city strategy

Follow this four part template to create a smart city strategy that you can use to become part of a larger push towards cities becoming smart(er). You can start with a city you know best, one that interests you, or the one you are working on. Start with what you already know and some research. This is going to be work-in-progress for a long time.

Don’t aim for perfection or completeness yet. It will evolve with time. With this strategy evolving you’ll know better which aspect of smart cities you’d like to be associated if you already don’t have a clue about it. This is what you need to do:

1. Run diagnostics on your city: First, take an honest, ruthless stock of your city — which aspects work and which don’t work, and what the future requirements are going to be. This, diagnostics, is an exercise urban professionals undertake routinely before any assignment.

2. Review and understand technology: Take a good look at the technological development that has taken place in last decade or so, and assess which ones can be directly or indirectly applied to make cities smarter

3. Tap data deluge: Most importantly, you will need to tap the benefits of the vast amount of data that is available and setup analytics systems that help you arrive at quick strategic decisions based on facts and evidence (this is the essence of technology-based smart cities) leading to sustainable solutions for our fast growing cities. This ‘bigdata’ must then become the integrating spine of you managing your city. You don’t need to be an expert yourself in this area but need to understand the basic concepts.

4. Create a multi-disciplinary team, your ‘mastermind’ group: You don’t have to know everything about smart cities, or even about the three aforementioned steps. But you certainly need to team up with smart people and organisations that can help you curate an integrated response to your situation, and have the capacity to deliver. This can be a formal professional alliance for a project you are working on or in preparation for a future project on a social media platform like LinkedIn or Twitter.

While creating this strategy you will come to know a lot about your own interests and strengths in smart cities with respect to what is happening and not happening around you. This will give you some idea about where the gaps are with respect to your strengths. While trying to be as broad in your approach to including topics in all four parts, don’t be concerned if you find it biased in favour of your own sector/specialisation. It’s indeed a good thing. It will give you direction to your final outcome.

The way forward

Such an approach will help you reinforce your knowledge-leadership and gain competitive advantage within a team or in the urban sector you work in (such a transport planning or landscape architecture, anthropology or policy making). However, this might appear simpler said than done. In order to accomplish the above, you may have several questions such as:

• While planners have always analysed their cities before planning — is there anything I could do differently now?

• Are there better techniques available than the conventional ones?

• Can I make the analyses more reliable than they were in the past?

• Is it possible to look at ALL technological developments in the past decade, let alone understand them all?

• How to know which one can be used in an urban context?

• Who are the people and organisations that can help me?

• Data deluge-I am drowning already — who can rescue me?

I know hundreds of urban professionals who want these and many more such questions answered. I won’t be surprised if you have some of these or more questions yourself.

Over next few weeks I will be covering all these questions and more, indeed walking you through the process of preparing all four parts of this template, bringing together my experience of working in this area for nearly 20 years, and that of experts from across the world.

Conclusion

This post focused on a 4-part strategy that you must prepare in order to understand your own strengths with respect to the gaps in the smart city sector your services can plug. Analysing your city of interest, technology, big data and assembling a mastermind team are four integral part of your smart city strategy that you use to further your career. Next few posts will guide you to prepare your very own smart city strategy that you can use to find a niche for yourself in this sector.

Call to action

While I am working on the next post please do send me your comments, suggestions and questions/issues you’d like addressed here through ‘Responses’ below or Twitter (@UrbanVarshney) or a direct message (arvind.varshney@gmail.com). Don’t forget to share with those who might have some interest in smart cities.

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