Reflections on Last Week’s Smart City Symposium

I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to address the Smart City Inter­na­tion­al Sym­po­sium in Chica­go last week. I hope the audi­ence had as much fun lis­ten­ing as I did pre­sent­ing a vision of secure, expe­ri­ence-dri­ven cit­i­zen engage­ment.

My goal was to share my unique-ish point-of-view on expe­ri­ence dri­ven mobile com­put­ing, what soft­ware devel­op­ment assump­tions need to change to embrace said future, and some ideas of the ben­e­fits that would result.

I had hoped that the metaphors I used to explain my point of view would enable the audi­ence to reframe some of their chal­lenges in ways that would help them achieve their objec­tives in a more cost-effec­tive man­ner with­out com­pro­mis­ing secu­ri­ty.

A few arti­facts:

1. My pre­sen­ta­tion (apolo­gies as there aren’t any speak­er notes at the moment, you can can down­load and lis­ten to a record­ing I made of the ~30 minute ses­sion). The pre­sen­ta­tion is in-full below as well.
2. A recent post on the ROI of Data. I believe a lot of peo­ple con­fuse “big data” (and data analy­sis) with “lots of data” (and sim­ply cre­at­ing an infra­struc­ture for shar­ing data out­side of appli­ca­tion silos, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly ana­lyz­ing it).
3. An exam­ple health­i­er smart city “offer­ing” that could reduce health insur­ance costs, improve cit­i­zen health, and become a mod­el for how to deploy “cit­i­zen solu­tions” instead of “gov­ern­ment process” for get­ting cities more con­nect­ed.

Get­ting ready for my talk I set­tled on some key points to make sure I cov­ered my ses­sion:

#1 Citizen value will be extracted from a smart infrastructure using software

I’m just not that impressed with the things them­selves. I mean, they’re impor­tant. And cool. But if we only think about the device and then the “stack on top of it” (the appli­ca­tion “silo”) it’s not going to be that inter­est­ing. Take, for exam­ple, smart park­ing garages. It’s great to have an app that lets me know where the spots are, helps me elim­i­nate pay­ment fric­tion, and so on. But, it’s not going to be real­ly inter­est­ing until that ties into the traf­fic sys­tem, and near­by event venues, and local events, so that when I’m try­ing to get to a con­cert it takes all of this into con­sid­er­a­tion to help min­i­mize trans­porta­tion fric­tion.

The val­ue of a smart city infra­struc­ture will be real­ized through soft­ware Click To Tweet

Anoth­er sim­ple exam­ple. Smart trash cans allow for more opti­mized garbage pick­up sav­ing fuel, salaries, and lead to clean­er streets. Amaz­ing ben­e­fits.

We have a cus­tomer who’s using the sen­sors in trash cans though to track rat infes­ta­tions (depart­ment of health stuff) and do more effi­cient home­less out­reach. They can sense when a can is being rum­maged by a human, dif­fer­ent than a rat rum­mag­ing around by the way. They can tell when the can is on fire, and when it’s cold they can use their own expe­ri­ence with home­less pop­u­la­tions to know that the fire has been delib­er­ate­ly set to stay warm. Instead of hav­ing out­reach ran­dom­ly roam­ing the streets to keep the home­less warm, direct­ed out­reach helps more peo­ple at a low­er cost.

But think­ing of that exam­ple… will some­one look for a “waste man­age­ment sys­tem” that sup­ports the home­less? Or, is it a com­mu­ni­ty out­reach piece of soft­ware that sup­ports waste man­age­ment? Words fail us as we try to con­nect hor­i­zon­tal­ly using the data avail­able, instead of the more tra­di­tion­al silo-ed approach to con­sid­er­ing soft­ware.

If that’s a con­fus­ing descrip­tion read my post on a smarter city is a health­i­er city and tell me if you think what I’m describ­ing is an insur­ance app, a smart city app, or a bike app? It’s it part of a patient record sys­tem or some­thing else? These words and cat­e­go­riza­tions mat­ter… and the real chal­lenge is that there are too many peo­ple who ben­e­fit, so it’s hard to move every­one for­ward because who, ulti­mate­ly, is respon­si­ble? It’s much eas­i­er for man­agers to stick with what they can direct­ly man­age rather than work through influ­ence when they can’t con­trol every­thing. (This of course is an incen­tive prob­lem… well beyond the scope of this post.)

Cities need to mod­el them­selves as a Mod­ern Soft­ware Fac­to­ry™ so that they can cre­ate an inno­va­tion plat­form just like Apple and Google have for their devices. If I had to depend on Apple to devel­op all the soft­ware for my iPhone, it would not be near­ly as use­ful as it is today with a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty of devel­op­ers cre­at­ing appli­ca­tions.

#2 Data is important, but there’s more

There’s some real inno­va­tion hap­pen­ing with smart devices, but device avail­abil­i­ty are not what’s hold­ing inno­va­tion back. There’s plen­ty of data avail­able today that’s too hard to access. Com­pa­nies need to build a data plat­form, and gov­ern the plat­form to make sure data is used “prop­er­ly” (what­ev­er that means in con­text).

There’s more.

I’ve been in the inte­gra­tion space for over 22 years. A while back I cre­at­ed my own mod­el for think­ing about inte­gra­tion projects that’s quite sim­ple. I struc­ture con­ver­sa­tions around three key things:

1. Data
2. Process
3. Events

Using these three, I feel like I can dis­as­sem­ble any “busi­ness require­ment” into a well under­stood inte­gra­tion project.

(As an aside, one of my favorite rants is about being more event-dri­ven using mod­ern, action­able noti­fi­ca­tions.)

In an econ­o­my dri­ven by cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (as ours is becom­ing), there’s anoth­er three-part lay­er to the three above:

1. Per­sona
2. Moment (on the cus­tomer jour­ney)
3. Job (to be done for that per­sona, at that moment in time)

For a per­sona, at a moment in time, a city (or com­pa­ny) uses the data, process­es, and events at their dis­pos­al to help com­plete a job.

How­ev­er, there’s one more bit. In the mobile world, the plat­form informs the expe­ri­ence.

These sev­en items can be used to com­plete­ly struc­ture any con­ver­sa­tion about a tech­nol­o­gy project and map the tech­nol­o­gy to the busi­ness out­comes. (I wel­come ideas or feed­back.)

#3 The economic model is harder than the technical one

It’s easy to come up with ideas, and while I think my 7-point ref­er­ence struc­ture is good, it doesn’t address the ROI or busi­ness mod­el for jus­ti­fy­ing a project.

In my exam­ple of home­less out­reach as a side-effect of a smart waste man­age­ment solu­tion above… I know that city couldn’t jus­ti­fy the cost of smart cans for the home­less out­reach ben­e­fits. In fact, as I under­stand it, they couldn’t even jus­ti­fy it for the sav­ings on smarter col­lec­tion. The way they were able to get the project approved had to do with rain. The cur­rent trash cans didn’t have cov­ers, and they had to vis­it them any­ways to install the cov­ers. The city was wise enough to real­ize that they could use that project to improve the ROI of installing sen­sors in the cans and cap­i­tal­ized on it.

These sorts of jus­ti­fi­ca­tions are going to be even more dif­fi­cult in the future (if I’m cor­rect) because I believe we need native mobile appli­ca­tions to max­i­mize the expe­ri­ences cre­at­ed. That’s an expen­sive and pos­si­bly divi­sive point-of-view. It’s going to require that we change the way we think about these projects.

One way I’ve start­ed to explain how we can think dif­fer­ent­ly about the eco­nom­ics of these sorts of projects has to do with data.

#4 Software development organizations make a lot of assumptions that they don’t realize we’re making

This point is actu­al­ly wor­thy of a post of it’s own.

I believe that there are many assump­tions about soft­ware devel­op­ment that have been made to help com­mu­ni­cate how soft­ware is devel­oped to non-tech­ni­cal parts of the orga­ni­za­tion. These assump­tions get insti­tu­tion­al­ized and they become hard to change.

Reminder: cross-plat­form UIs mean your prod­uct looks con­sis­tent to you and weird to all of your actu­al users. https://t.co/NvT3X8KKDS

— Bene­dict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 4, 2017

A great exam­ple is the idea of “write once, run every­where” devel­op­ment. We’ve been able to use desk­top devel­op­ment prac­tices (in the enter­prise) and fake mobile inter­ac­tion mod­els… for exam­ple, using emails for noti­fi­ca­tions and believ­ing that’s enough. but I believe that with aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR), that’s final­ly going to change. There won’t be any way for some time to cre­ate high-qual­i­ty cross-plat­form AR solu­tions.

AR by itself isn’t a plat­form but it is pre­cise­ly the kind of plat­form fea­ture that makes cross-plat­form impos­si­ble. https://t.co/A8NqOSIvq5

— 🧘🏻‍♂️Steven Sinof­sky ॐ (@stevesi) August 30, 2017

I have a few draft posts on this top­ic, and even a prod­uct idea in my head on this one (that I’ll prob­a­bly share because I don’t real­ly want to start a tech­ni­cal prod­uct com­pa­ny).

#5 Private-public partnerships will bring a mission-oriented focus to commercial smart city efforts

At the Smart City Sym­po­sium a pan­el of may­ors talked about their efforts to mod­ern­ize their cities. Not one talked about tech­nol­o­gy (at least direct­ly). They talked about inequal­i­ty, how trans­porta­tion impacts qual­i­ty of life or abil­i­ty to get/keep a job, and how to get peo­ple to come togeth­er as a com­mu­ni­ty.

Back at point #3 I men­tioned how the eco­nom­ic mod­el is hard. That’s only (in part) because we don’t real­ly val­ue mis­sion-based cit­i­zen ben­e­fits as equals to oth­er stake­hold­ers. We’re used to pay­ing cus­tomers, or cus­tomers who exchange some­thing (like pri­va­cy) which can then be mon­e­tized through adver­tis­ing.

Here’s an exam­ple on my mind, just because I saw an arti­cle on bank fees ear­li­er today. When some­one bounces a pay­ment they pay a fee. Let’s say I have $10 in an account and make 3 pay­ments: one for $3, one for $15, and one for $6.

If the bank process­es them in the order I list­ed (and let’s pre­tend that’s the order they hap­pen), the cus­tomer pays 2 fees. The $3 pay­ment goes through, the two remain­ing bounce.

The bank could choose to process them as first, third, sec­ond, to min­i­mize fees. What’s their incen­tive? Cus­tomer ser­vice? That’s not enough incen­tive for man­agers try­ing to hit rev­enue tar­gets (and bonus goals).

The third way to process them would be to max­i­mize fees by pro­cess­ing the largest first. That one busts the account, and the cus­tomer pays three fees in total for each of the three pay­ments.

As crazy as the third option sounds, some banks were caught doing just that.

Pro­cess­ing them in the order they were made is “fair”. Put the onus on the cus­tomer. But that’s the oppo­site of a good cus­tomer expe­ri­ence where we are sup­posed to min­i­mize the cus­tomer bur­den. How­ev­er, jus­ti­fy­ing the idea that if fees are min­i­mized today so that the cus­tomer can get ahead in some unknown future (maybe) and be a bet­ter cus­tomer… that’s not going to hap­pen because banks need to make mon­ey. They’ll go so far, but it’s going to take some­thing com­plete­ly dis­rup­tive to elim­i­nate fees that oth­er­wise seem fair.

An exam­ple of a com­pa­ny inno­vat­ing here is Robin­hood, who com­petes with the e-bro­kers by elim­i­nat­ing trad­ing com­mis­sions. I believe Robin­hood is an excep­tion that proves the rule. They can be effi­cient on their back end because they emerged and start­ed from scratch with­out hav­ing to deal with a lot of lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy or busi­ness mod­els.

Pri­vate pub­lic part­ner­ships are an oppor­tu­ni­ty to deliv­er mis­sion-dri­ven smart city ben­e­fits to cit­i­zens Click To Tweet

We have to fig­ure out how to incor­po­rate a mis­sion-dri­ven approach to smart cities, and I believe that city, state, and fed­er­al work­ers can hold us account­able to their mis­sions in a way that makes how we apply our tech­nol­o­gy more impact­ful than it oth­er­wise would be.