Is Your City Smart? Here's How to Know.

Cities around the world have begun to move forward with implementing smart city initiatives. However, while most understand why urban transformation is necessary, a big challenge plaguing many city’s digital innovation is the struggle to define what it actually means to be ‘smart’ and how to ultimately get there.

To help with this, global trade association TM Forum recently launched a comprehensive, end-to-end Smart City Maturity and Benchmark Model, designed to capture what it really means to be a smart city.

The model allows a city to quickly assess its strengths and weaknesses in key dimension areas related to city ‘smartness’ – including leadership and governance, stakeholder engagement and citizen focus, effective use of data and integrated ICT infrastructure and other existing smart capabilities – and to set clear goals as to how it wishes to transform over the next two to five years. It also enables the city to benchmark itself against similar cities and identify other cities with whom it can partner to tackle similar challenges.

The Smart City Maturity and Benchmark Model takes an end-to-end holistic view across city agencies and departments to capture the key aspects of a city’s transformation journey to become a smarter city. A smart city is characterized by a high level of community and citizen engagement, by making the city attractive for businesses and by efficient and sustainable city operations.

The model allows a city to quickly assess its strengths and weaknesses in five key dimension areas related to city smartness and to set clear goals for it wishes to transform over the next two to five years. It enables the city to benchmark itself against similar cities and identify other cities with whom it can partner to tackle similar challenges. The model draws from a large number of reputable sources in the urban innovation field, ranging from standards and industry organizations to policy and best practices organizations.