Subscribe

CT receives smart city report

Marin'e Jacobs
By Marin'e Jacobs
Johannesburg, 24 Oct 2013
Sherry Comes, chief technology officer at IBM, was also one of the speakers at this year's GovTech conference.
Sherry Comes, chief technology officer at IBM, was also one of the speakers at this year's GovTech conference.

An IBM design team this morning presented its recommendations to the Cape Town city council. This comes after Cape Town was chosen as the World Design Capital (WDC) for 2014.

A major global city is chosen every two years to be the WDC capital and receive the IBM Smart City grant. The previous WDC was Helsinki, Finland. In essence, Cape Town gets to choose a problem that it would like addressed and a world-class team works on it for three weeks to come up with solutions that will bring Cape Town closer to smart city status.

The business problem selected by Cape Town is: "How can the City of Cape Town effectively use and manage its social assets to optimise service delivery?"

Cape Town mayor Patricia De Lille says the problem was selected, because the city deploys a wide range of municipal infrastructure assets in order to obtain income and deliver services to the 3.7 million people who live in Cape Town. De Lille says the infrastructural assets are associated with utility services and engineering, and have a "technical logic", informing their distribution, as well as the internal allocation of organisational responsibilities.

"The distribution and location of these assets have, in many cases, been informed by events rather than being the product of careful planning, including the fact that they are largely the amalgamation of the social assets of our precursor municipalities."

According to De Lille, the needs of Cape Town's communities change frequently, which gives rise to the question of whether the city's social assets actually cater for the communities' needs.

Optimising service delivery

Sherry Comes, chief technology officer at IBM and one of the six members of the team working on Cape Town's design model, says the purpose of the WDC project is to turn global cities across the world into smarter cities. "IBM invests to work with the city to address the challenges they experience in a smart way in an effort to optimise service delivery."

She explains that a more holistic approach is taken to the problems experienced in Cape Town and the team suggests ways in which the challenges can be approached, rather than suggesting the implementation of specific smart solutions. She says the team intentionally does not suggest IBM smart solutions as that is not the purpose of the project.

Recommendations in the Cape Town design model include how the city can use data optimally, apply change management, manage its social assets better and apply design thinking, she says. It is then up to the city to implement the recommendations or not, although IBM keeps communicating with the city council to provide advice along the way. The project comes at no cost to Cape Town and it is under no obligation to do business with IBM afterwards.

Comes says the report presented to the council this morning includes approximately 60 recommendations with additional sub-recommendations. "We conducted about 50 interviews and interviewed over 70 people. We toured the city and the informal settlements, found out what is working and what is not working, and spoke to the city council, officials, politicians and executives."

She says the design team already met with De Lille last night to give an overview of the report and the feedback has been very positive. "She just sat at that table with us for hours asking questions. She is a smart, smart lady."

Comes notes that having Cape Town as the WDC for 2014, is likely to put the spotlight on smart cities in Africa and allow the recommendations implemented in the Mother City to spill over to other cities in SA and Africa.

Share