By Phil Anderson - Monday, September 30, 2013
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) believes its CityNext initiative stands out from other vendors' smart city suites because it is designed to accelerate learning of ICT skills, Microsoft's Latin America government sector lead José Miguel Calderón told BNamericas at last week's XIV Latin American digital cities summit in Quito.
In this way, citizens themselves are capable of becoming involved with a smart city program, contributing their ideas, experience and energy, he added.
Acceleration, of innovation and opportunities, is one of three goals behind Microsoft's CityNext program, launched globally in July, the other two goals being to facilitate the transformation of operations and infrastructure, and to help citizens and businesses connect with each other and with government, Microsoft's Latin America public sector general manager Jeannette Arbulu said when presenting the CityNext program in Quito.
CITY CONTROL DASHBOARD
Arbulu and Calderón took advantage of the event to announce the availability in Latin America of an open-source, cloud-based city management dashboard that allows city leaders and citizens alike to assess their city in terms of several KPIs.
And just as citizens can use the platform to view real-time information on any number of variables - like traffic flow, public transport, pollution, accidents, weather or parking spaces - city governments from around the region can also view the data and thus learn whether a peer city has been able to make progress in dealing with problem situations. Microsoft assumes that in such cases a mayor from one city will be keen to contact the mayor from another that has made progress, leading to greater sharing of knowledge.
Access to the dashboard software is free of charge, and it is up to city governments to decide which variables will be published and which sections of the dashboard will be available to citizens.
The dashboard interface is based on the Windows 8 and Xbox interfaces, and when asked whether a formal institution like city government would be loathe to use a medium so closely related to gaming and entertainment, Calderón pointed out that the interfaces are based on years of research into the best way for people to interact with computers. "Why not allow people to interact with their local government via Skype through their TV or Xbox? If people prefer to work with local government from their living room, why not? And even better if it's from their telephone!" he says.
Microsoft developed the dashboard in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), not for financial reasons, but because the IDB assesses cities using a methodology based on more than 200 indicators that have been proven by the UN.
And although the dashboard is free, Arbulu agreed that there is a business aspect in that the system gives cities an incentive to deploy more data-gathering systems. For example, the data-sharing aspect means the platform can showcase smart city programs that Microsoft is already involved in, such as the Medellín Digital e-government portal in Colombia; the electronic surveillance platform deployed by bus company São Paulo Transporte in Brazil, which has improved service reliability by 30%; and the government contact center in Panama that was deployed in 60 days using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Citizens Platform (CSP).
The dashboard is hosted on Microsoft's Codeplex SaaS site, in datacenters that run the Windows Azure cloud solutions platform.
