Lim Chee Siong, CMO for Huawei Southern Pacific Region, breaks down basic requirements for enabling smart cities, starting with a clear strategy and roadmap for implementation
Vision 2015: There are different ways of approaching the smart city concept. How does Huawei conceptualize it?
Lim Chee Siong: Our overall concept of a smart city is embodied within our key strategy, which is focused on building a better connected world. It is this idea which provides the connectivity to underpin a complete portfolio of smart city solutions. These solutions encompass sensing, analyzing and integrating key information representing a city’s core operating infrastructure and systems. Our concept is that a smart city improves the quality and intelligence of its citizen’s livelihoods, enhances environmental protection, public safety, urban services, security, education, while generating positive GDP growth by fostering and enabling business activities and efficiencies.
So how would you sum up the basic needs and strategies of smart cities?
A smart city must support three major strategies: growing the GDP, enhancing the quality of life for its citizens and providing an attractive, secure and safe environment in which all its citizens will feel at home.
What are the various elements comprising a smart city?
Any smart city will of course be made up of a number of core elements defined by a complex mesh of systems across industry sectors such as transportation, energy, water and healthcare. Huawei has embraced this understanding through the development of solutions across four key sectors: urban development and sustainability; social development for communities, including health, education and enterprises; public safety, security and disaster management; and government efficiency and openness.
By centrally managing these sectors, a smart city allows the sharing of data and capabilities across multiple systems, agencies, and enterprises. Such sharing enables an ecosystem where the most widely adopted and innovative applications will establish trends and provide guiding examples of intelligent infrastructure development, public service convenience, social management refinements and optimized industry structures.
What are the key underlying technologies to enable smart cities?
Underlying each of the domains mentioned above are some key technology foundational elements. The technology innovations of cloud computing, Big Data, mobile internet, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are addressing these elements through the creation of intelligent, convenient, and energy efficient information systems. Such systems help city leaders to more effectively deliver services, ensure public security and increase food safety, sanitation, energy availability as well as reducing negatives such as traffic congestion.
To that end, we are developing agile supporting infrastructure to deliver innovative high-speed networks, citywide public information platforms, ubiquitous mobile broadband access and comprehensive information security. We are also creating IoT advancements such as cellular IoT - or “one hop technology” - which enables the rollout of sensors with battery life of more than 10 years and reduces the need for tower infrastructure. Huawei is taking a major role in this promising development through research and development, strategic acquisitions and working group contributions.
We are also developing solutions for smart homes that can save energy, enhance remote health and improve security, as well as improve the environment by simple air quality monitoring in the home. These homes will be able to pass both identifiable and anonymous data that will enable agencies, and enterprises to make smart analytical decisions.
There are typically a lot of different players involved in a smart city project - i.e. different municipal departments, utilities, devices, partners, etc. What’s the best way to unify all this under a workable architecture that everyone can use?
This question can be best answered by looking at a roadmap for a typical smart city. A coherent architecture must be envisioned, developed and implemented. The construction of a smart city infrastructure is a deliberate process underpinned by best-practice methodologies. The US, EU, and UK have announced their methodologies and practices regarding top-level design for smart cities, including OASIS Transformational Government Framework (TGF), European Interoperability Framework (EIF), smart city Framework (SCF), and G-Cloud.
These key references articulate a number of common viewpoints. For a start, each city has its own issues, so there is no one-size-fits-all smart city solution. Also, it requires extensive cooperation. Reliance on top-down administration cannot solely ensure a smart city’s success; instead, there must be an official program in which all stakeholders participate.
Government policies must allow access to the data. An information-sharing platform and marketplace for ideas must be set up to encourage innovation in applications. A smart city development must be an iterative process built in phases, with clear guiding principles, vision, roadmaps, and delivery programs.
And finally, smart cities start with smart government. So governments must transform themselves in areas such as leadership and governance, operating models, procurement management, digital asset management, and channel management - reducing costs and improving the efficiency of public services.
Our experience has shown that in order to unify all of the above under a workable architecture, city leaders must design a clear vision that best suits local conditions, including a phased roadmap under the direction of a dedicated leadership team. This team should ensure the openness of city data for information sharing, and the availability of service procurement and supply models.
The vision for any smart city must be clear (measurable), competitive (differentiated from others based on local characteristics) and inclusive (including political, economic, and environmental factors). Designs should focus on citizen-centric design and delivery models, universal digitalization of city spaces and systems, and an open, collaborative process for information collection and sharing. The roadmap should also be a pragmatic framework with clear goals in achievable phases.
Cities may have different priorities, but the ultimate high-level goal is the same: to improve local quality of life. When drafting a top-level workable architectural design, city leaders must use both digital communication and IT technologies to resolve compromises that involve politics, law, competing organizations and technical resources. The best outcomes come about when citizens and businesses engage collaboratively in service design, provisioning, and delivery. A smart city should also have the flexibility to evolve based upon the requirements of its citizens. It is born from the wisdom of the citizens for whom it provides services and works best when generated by citizens and for citizens.
What can we expect to see in terms of smart city projects in APAC in the future?
In the Asia Pacific region, because we have a diverse mixture of developing and highly developed countries, we are seeing many different smart city projects being initiated or in the planning stages. Solutions areas that are a focus for the APAC market are Safe City, Smart Buildings, Smart Transportation, Smart Resources, Smart Governments and Smart Water. In developing countries, health, education and tourism are also major focus areas.
Many of the industry analysts are touting global investment numbers between the years 2015-2030 at around $185 billion for smart cities. Most of the growth is expected to come in Asia-Pacific, starting in 2015 and growing to around $12 billion annually by 2020.
This article first appeared on Telecom Asia Vision 2015 Supplement December 2014 edition