Certification can be a powerful process. It can drive innovation, leadership and best practice. For some sectors and industries, it has been transformational (think green building certification).
But certification does not happen in isolation, it requires many components to work most effectively. For starters, it needs a standard, or some benchmark to certify against. It also needs a certification process to be defined, and architected to provide the assessment of performance for which certification is granted, or not.
For smart cities, some of these pieces are already in the market. For example, the international standard ISO 37106: 2018 Sustainable cities and communities - Guidance on establishing smart city operating models for sustainable communities. In fact, certification has already been awarded under this standard, granted by the British Standards Institute to the City of Sejong in South Korea in late 2018. It is in fact the world's first 'certified' smart city, against the ISO standard.
But what about the buildings blocks of our cities - the precincts, communities and campuses? Might smart cities certification help drive competition, and accelerate best practice outcomes for our citizens and businesses, from using technology and data?
In 2018 the Smart Cities Council released the Code for Smart Communities, a document that defines smart urban development through five principles and over 30 metrics. Could this be the benchmark for a future potential smart commuinties certification system? Could smart communities certification create enough excitement, action and investment in smart technology and data enablers to help our cities achieve their goals and targets?
Questions that come to mind for us include:
- Is our industry ready for smart cities certification?
- How do we make sure the process is transparent (eg. who would perform such certification?)
- Are the metrics in the Code for Smart Communities suitable, and what type of scoring or quantitative assessment process would be required?
- And above all, would there be demand for such certification?
We look forward to asking more questions and recieving feedback in 2020.
