A little smarter every day

I had a breakfast meeting today with a colleague and a community leader joined us.

Our conversation was pretty wide ranging, including topics such as emergency preparedness, disaster recovery, cloud strategies, economic development, cell towers and more. All of this in one hour while still having enough time to enjoy kippers and bagels. Yes, we spoke with food in our mouths.

We talked about how the community agencies responded to the ice storms in late December and where the communications systems succeeded on some levels but failed to handle the peak loads of traffic from citizen calls and web traffic.

We started talking about development of a smart city strategy. I suggested that whatever overall strategy emerged, it would be important to identify bite-sized pieces. Get local citizens involved to help prioritize which bites should be nibbled first.

More than once on these pages I have said “Set clear objectives. Align activities with the achievement of those objectives. Stop doing things that are contrary to the objectives.”

A city won’t become a smart city overnight. It doesn’t have to. We don’t go to school and get programmed all at once.

But a city should get a little smarter every day. Like all of us, building a smart city should be a process requiring ‘continuing education’ and skills enhancement. It needs an evangelist to be working with community agencies and local businesses to develop a culture of digital leadership.

This could be an approach for all levels of government as we develop digital strategies.

The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Building a smart city means creating a culture that works to make the community a little bit smarter every day.