At least that was the advice from South Bend, Ind., Chief Innovation Officer Denise Linn Riedl on a panel last month at the Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo. “The first step is really understanding what people want,” she said.
“It also helps to put on display how creative innovation and technology can be,” she added.
When considering digitally transforming internal processes, the conversation often centers around improvements to efficiency and cost savings, said Glendale, Ariz., CIO Feroz Merchhiya.
“Innovation is not inventing new. Innovation is finding creative new ways of leveraging assets and resources and capabilities, and bringing them together to deliver the services,” Merchhiya said during the smart cities panel.
“The idea is to understand what business problem we are trying to solve. Once you figure what you’re trying to solve, then ‘how’ becomes much easier,” he added.
Merchhiya told the other city staffers and technologists in the room to make the case for those changes by translating them into cost savings or operational improvements.
“Proposing an idea is one thing. Showing the value and also going back and recording the success or completion of that commitment is important,” he said.
Much of the digital transformation of cities we now see was given a jump-start and boost by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced government to move quickly in areas like introducing new technologies or processes.
“I saw it as five years in five months,” remarked Raimundo Rodulfo, director of innovation and technology and chief innovation officer for the city of Coral Gables, Fla.
The pandemic quickly modernized views around issues like the ubiquity of broadband and helped to fund the development of fiber-optic infrastructure expansion, he said, adding that the crisis helped solidify broadband as a more of a utility than a luxury.
“You can’t sit on that,” Riedl said of the momentum COVID brought to cities and their thrust to modernize digitally. “You have to take advantage of the moment. And I think that, and a lot of the change that was forced during COVID, has made this the perfect time to tackle this as a city.”
Similarly, “quality of life" is a way to focus the narrative for need for various digital transformation projects, Riedl said.
Digital transformation “supports everything,” she added.
“Whether it’s potholes, sidewalks, crime — there’s a digital transformation component to everything,” Riedl said. “So I have to know what elected officials care about, I have to know what our residents care about, so I know how to allocate my team’s time.”
