SIEMENS

Mayor S. enjoys the ride to his office this morning. He takes the bus as he always does — part of a campaign to persuade citizens to use public transportation. He’s pleased to see that ridership is up compared to a year ago. Back then, a downtown toll was introduced to reduce rush-hour traffic congestion, and it seems to be having the desired effect.

When he gets to his desk, the Mayor checks to see whether the impression he received on the bus is borne out by facts. In his City Cockpit he can look up how many people have traveled to work this morning by bus or rail and how smoothly the traffic flowed. Alongside the current statistics and graphic displays he sees a yellow light that tells him that his new traffic plan still is not working smoothly in some parts of the city. He’ll need to discuss this problem with his traffic planners.

Mayor S. can use the City Cockpit to keep himself informed not only about the current traffic situation but also about many other aspects of city life. Green lights tell him that everything is going very well for the police, the fire department, and the sanitation services. The light for the public offices is yellow and for the finance department it’s red. So there’s a good reason why the whole morning has been reserved for budget discussions.

Singapore’s Living Lab. This vision could soon become a reality, because a prototype of the City Cockpit already exists — at Siemens in Singapore. Here, state-of-the-art information and communication technology (ICT) enables the mayor and other decision-makers to track and analyze processes in their city in real time. All of the important information flows into a central system that processes the data for convenient display and indicates to what extent specified objectives are being met.

The computer on whose user interface all the data of a fictitious city converge and are displayed is located in Siemens’ “City of the Future,“ a demonstration center for future solutions that Siemens established two years ago in Singapore with support from the government of the city-state. “The City of the Future demonstrates how ICT can be useful in mastering the challenges that are facing cities today,” says Klaus Heidinger, who is in charge of Smart Eco Cities at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT). “Singapore is an excellent location for this Competence Center because its government is willing to serve as a ‘living lab’ for new administrative methods.” (see Pictures of the Future, Fall 2010, Catching Up).

Municipal governments from all over the world are sending delegations to Singapore in order to learn from the city’s experiences. More than 200 groups have already visited the City of the Future in order to learn through multimedia presentations and from interactive consoles how clever networking of information can lay the foundations for better and faster decision-making.

“The ICT revolution is opening up entirely new opportunities for solving problems — for instance, in the areas of communications, transportation, and the infrastructure,” says Andrew Tan, General Manager of Singapore’s National Environment Agency. “It will change the way governments work, think, and interact with their citizens.”

One example of this change is the fact that in Singapore — as city officials are quick to point out — it takes no longer than 15 minutes to process the registration of a new business. This is just one of many process optimizations that have earned this city its status as southeast Asia’s business hub and the affluence that goes with it.

Such high standards can only be met if the entire administrative apparatus stays focused on constantly becoming more efficient and effective. A vital part of this process is the establishment and testing of performance criteria, which is supported by ICT solutions such as those provided by the City Cockpit. So by midday the fictitious Mayor S. will be able to check and see how his public offices have been doing that morning. His employees have to meet strict targets regarding the speed at which they process requests and inquiries from citizens. The expectation is that responsive performance by city officials will encourage citizens to support the community more responsibly in return.

Responding within 24 hours. If a citizen takes a photo of a damaged park bench or a filthy public toilet and uploads it to a city administration web site, he or she can expect to receive a response within 24 hours explaining how municipal officials will deal with the problem. The software used by city employees to make such responses also records how many inquiries are received and whether the necessary actions have been completed within the specified time limit.

This information is not only available to department heads but is also fed into the City Cockpit. This shows Mayor S. that the deadlines are being met, even though the public’s use of this channel for inquiries and complaints regarding community matters has been increasing steadily since the new system was implemented. In the first weeks of the new system’s utilization he still used to see a red light in his computer — showing that city officials were overloaded with the flood of requests. But training courses and the assignment of additional employees seem to have solved the initial problems.

“City Cockpit makes information available to mayors that would have previously required a staff of assistants to collect,” says Heidinger. “We provide this information by working with various types of data that already exist.” For instance, traffic management systems based on the use of sensors for measuring the number of vehicles crossing intersections can help optimize the timing of traffic lights. In conjunction with information from subway and bus management systems, such data can create a real-time image of a city’s traffic conditions, and thus provide information for improving services. The management systems of a city’s energy network, water supply system, public finances, and public offices can be similarly correlated.

Better Decision-Making. Of course the City Cockpit doesn’t produce results on autopilot. “State-of-the-art technology can make information accessible and display it conveniently, but managers still have to make decisions,” says Seo Hian Julian Goh, a former Singapore city planner who joined Siemens as head of Smart City Solutions within the company’s Cities Competence Center.

“Many key changes are political in nature and require sound judgment about how to use available resources and where priorities lie,” notes Goh. “But in every case, better information leads to better decisions.” Of course, the gathering of information must be conducted strictly in accordance with applicable data protection regulations.

Ashish Lall, a management professor at the National University of Singapore, believes that expanded use of information and communication technology will help to structure administrations more effectively, make them more efficient, and foster more cooperation and greater transparency. In areas where departments have been operating more or less independently of each other, their processes will be systematically interlinked in the future. “City management via ICT calls for organizational changes,” says Lall. “Contradictory regulations, complicated processes, and the ‘Not Invented Here’ mentality must be changed.” What’s more, ICT is an interactive medium that not only improves coordination between governmental offices but also fosters contact with the public.

Returning to our City Cockpit scenario, contact with citizens has been so effective that Mayor S. can even check to see how many people in his city are doing their laundry at the moment. The mayor has been urging the installation of digital electric meters that support differentiated electric power pricing. Low electricity prices in the evening hours are designed to offer incentives to households to not use appliances with high power demand such as washing machines in the daytime, when the city’s electricity consumption is high due to business and office use. And in fact, City Cockpit gives Mayor S. a yellow light. The initiative is starting to pay off. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the city’s energy efficiency. But thanks to this evolving technology, city officials will at least know where their challenges lie.