Virginia Chief Data Officer to ‘kick-off’ Device & Asset Management Collaborative Planning
Cities helping cities to kick start your planning process
- The Smart Cities Council will lead an online collaborative planning process for cities that seek to implement device and asset management.
- Virginia’s Chief Data Officer, Carlos Rivero has agreed to ‘kick-off’ this collaborative planning project by:
- Focusing on how data-sharing between agencies, cities and counties is requiring these entities to use best practices in their own deployments; and,
- An overview of the ‘end game’ for the data produced by this type of project. Do you keep all the data in your city or share it with others or possibly use a civic-data-trust. Possibly, all of the above.
- This is for cities only and any city in the world can participate.
- The first session for this collaborative planning is June 2, 2020, at TBA.
City data is guiding this process
Data from the Smart Cities Council 2019 Readiness Challenge, which exclusively focused on North American cities (over 200+ projects from Canada, Mexico and the US) and our 2019 survey of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 139 cities and counties found that a fundamental use case for IoT was device and asset monitoring.
This is partly explained by the economic necessity of keeping existing assets operable and partly explained by growing cybersecurity threats. Regarding maintenance, the Brookings Institution has pointed out in several reports that American cities were significantly increasing their operating expenditures for infrastructure and asset maintenance as opposed to the capital expense of building new infrastructure or acquiring new assets
Cities are considering projects managing devices and assets because, as Smart Cities Council data reveals, these projects -
- can get started quickly (in less than a year)
- can be started with a six-figure budget (thus within most city budgets)
- have a good ROI
- can be implemented city-wide, thus extending benefits to multiple departments (also leading to possibly the sharing of costs between these departments.)
Technology choices and cybersecurity issues make these projects risky
Device and asset management involves choices about hardware (sensors and instrumentation,) communications (5G, wireless, etc.) data management (schemas and interoperability) and analytics. For each of these choices, a city has numerous technical scoping and specification decisions to make. There are many solution providers, some offering an integrated platform approach, others just a key component.
Connecting devices and assets so that a city has synchronous communications (two-way) that not only collects data; but also allows city to automate responses based on prioritized rules can also increase cyber-risk
‘How to’ connect and manage devices and assets
Cities understand that connecting devices and assets can provide significant benefits as to operations maintenance, decreasing costs and improving response times – AND, now they want to understand ‘how’ to kick-start this kind of project.
The Activator Planning Process - online, collaborative and free
Learn from other cities about -
- Common device and asset management problems among cities
- Solutions that work for cities
- Who should be at the table as you plan?
- Starting your project
- Measuring success
- Where to look for funding your plan?
Deliverables will include a project plan template called ‘Device and Asset Management Roadmap' that your city can customize to your needs. You will also be able to talk to other cities about common problems and possible solutions.
