The president’s dream is no big surprise, since the ultimate goal of a smart city is to deliver enhanced quality of life for citizens, along with tangible benefits at all levels of government. A smart city is about ensuring common objectives like safety and security, or the provision of services in the form of utilities and transportation networks.
Clive Charlton, head of Solution Architecture for Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS, says from a public sector perspective, there is certainly an appetite for local smart cities. This appetite has only increased since AWS launched its local hyperscale data centre in Cape Town.
“One obvious benefit of this is the improved latency, which is critical for a smart city, as there will be many devices and sensors that need to deliver communications rapidly. At the same time, data sovereignty and compliance is also taken care of,” he says.
“Having access to AWS’s own services has further enabled them to innovate, particularly around the access to, and availability of, communications channels between government and citizens. These could take many forms, such as online participation platforms, social media channels, websites and more.”
In this way, he continues, the public sector has access to public opinion, and this can now be taken into account when creating policy. Such instant communication between the two has not been possible in the past, so the first step to a successful smart city is facilitating this conversation.
“We’ve made our AWS cloud platform available for use by the public sector, as it is a good foundation on which to build the infrastructure that enables a smart city to operate. This means they no longer have to build everything from scratch; instead, they can use our existing tools as building blocks to more easily craft new digital services.
“Furthermore, as true smart technology adoption begins, it also opens up new opportunities. A good example of this is how Transport London used AWS’s digital services to establish a third-party developer system, largely by making its data available to SMEs. This allowed them to leverage this travel information to create a plethora of travel planning solutions for Londoners.”
Conversational AI
Of course, he cautions, building a smart city takes time, so it’s imperative that government starts small and builds towards it.
“It’s important to innovate rapidly, however small you start, so the key, really, is to get going now and begin looking at the needs of citizens within individual municipalities. Of course, in getting started, it’s vital for the process to be driven from the top down, such as has been the case with President Ramaphosa’s messaging around this subject,” continues Charlton.
“Municipalities should now take their lead from the president and seek to begin adopting services that are able to meet citizen requirements and demands. Naturally, AWS and our various technology partners stand ready to assist with this.”
He points out the importance of having the communications channels mentioned earlier available, in order to obtain clarity around what the citizens’ requirements are. In South Africa, the public sector can already leverage GovChat, which is a centralised hub that brings governmental and civic services together through a conversational AI that can be accessed via various channels.
Municipalities should now take their lead from the president and seek to begin adopting services that are able to meet citizen requirements and demands. Naturally, AWS and our various technology partners stand ready to assist with this.
“In fact, a great example of how the cloud and these digital communication channels work together is that when the president announced the reintroduction of the social relief grant, GovChat was used to deliver application information to citizens. With millions of people applying, AWS ensured that the infrastructure was able to cope with such a large influx of queries,” he notes.
“Our engineers made sure that there was rapidly scalable cloud architecture behind the process, able to deal with the massive numbers of citizens querying things. In fact, the system handled some 18.8 million messages in just 24 hours, across various social media platforms, and has processed some 500 million messages since inception, and over 12 million grant applications.”
Controlling wastage
So where do we go from here, as we seek to build smarter cities for the future? Charlton suggests that municipalities identify a place to start; after all, he says, once you get the innovation flywheel spinning, momentum will quickly increase from there.
“Metering is a good place to start. Think of how much water revenue is currently lost through non-revenue issues, like water leaks. With the advent of better and cheaper smart water meters, able to send data to the AWS cloud, municipalities can have a near real-time view of consumption and demand. With this, it becomes a much simpler matter to control wastage, boost provision and improve the overall service delivery to citizens.
“AWS is eager to assist cities around SA to begin developing smart services, and we certainly feel that gaining a clear understanding of and improvement in the provisioning of water and electricity is a great place to begin. This is low-hanging fruit that will have a rapid and highly visible impact on both government revenue and service delivery to citizens. And, of course, once the early benefits are witnessed and the ball begins rolling, it won’t be long before our cities start to get much smarter,” he concludes.
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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