SA cities get ‘smarter’
JOBURG - South African cities, including Johannesburg, are getting smarter about service delivery.
IBM, which has been involved in driving initiatives towards smarter cities around the world, is now focusing its efforts on cities in South Africa.
The global powerhouse aims to improve city leaders’ grasp of how to address managing transportation, water, public safety and other social services through technology.
According to Lisa Rautenbach, IBM’s external relations manager, nearly any physical system at work in cities can now be monitored, measured and managed.
Rautenbach said IBM had the ability to collect and analyse real-time information on aspects of a city, including transport networks, hospitals and the electricity grid.
This information, she said, could be used to predict how changes to one system would affect another in order to address them more quickly and reduce risk or to develop new business models and partnerships with the private sector.
After working with 2 000 city projects around the world in the last three years, IBM has learned from other cities how they address their challenges.
“We’ve found that an intelligent operations centre, a sort of ‘mission control’ for a city, can co-ordinate the massive amounts of data coming in from various sources, such as water demands, road congestion or energy usage in order to provide a co-ordinated, sensible city-wide response to all of the demands of an everyday city,” she said.
While the technologies used by IBM in various cities were similar, Rautenbach said each city’s challenges and leadership were unique, thus approaches were adaptive.
She did not comment on any projects being undertaken in specific South African cities.
The City of Johannesburg did not respond to questions regarding its initiatives.
