Learning from a Small, Smart City

#Discussions(General) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…

Learning from a Small, Smart City

The digital age
Big Data
Ongoing innovations

Auto extracted Text……

(TNS) – Racine may be one of the smallest cities to seriously pursue Smart City technologies, but it’s not the first — not in the Midwest and not even in the Great Lakes region.
Aurora, Illinois, a western Chicago suburb less than two hours’ drive from Racine, has been researching and rolling out smart technologies for about two years.Racine may be one of the smallest cities to seriously pursue Smart City technologies, but it’s not the first — not in the Midwest and not even in the Great Lakes region.

Aurora, Illinois, a western Chicago suburb less than two hours’ drive from Racine, has been researching and rolling out smart technologies for about two years. In that time, the city hit several milestones laid out in a technology strategic plan for 2018-19 which analyzed in detail where the city was, where it wanted to go and how it wanted to get there

In 2018, Aurora was one of the finalists in the 2018 Smart Cities Readiness Challenge, which the City of Racine won in 2019.
Irvin and Chief Informational Officer Michael Pegues attended Racine’s Smart Cities Convention and spoke on several panels about lessons the city has learned along the way, laying out potential payoffs and pitfalls in the transition to a 21st Century city.
Irvin likes to point out that Aurora was nicknamed the City of Lights because it was one of the first to install public electric streetlights.
With about 200,000 residents, Aurora is a much larger city than Racine.
Irvin said one of the keys to getting the support of the general public to invest in smart technology is to explain, in plain language, how the investment will improve quality of life.
The city’s information technology systems were split between City Hall, the police department and other city departments so first step was to consolidate them under one IT department.
The city also created several new IT positions, including a chief information security officer and a data analytics director, which opens up options for collecting data, analyzing it to improve services and, most importantly, keep them safe.
“You want your data person to understand the work in your organization, and you want the people in your organization to understand the data,” said Richardson.
“People talk about the technology but you’ve got to look at the policies, your procedures,” said Pegues.
Also, Pegues said, if the partner entity is able to monetize that data, the municipality should receive some of tha

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.0299999999 Build 26 Aug 2019