Page 26 - Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

standards and templates for data, algorithms, quality assurance processes, performance, lifetime
estimates and security.

Why: One of the biggest challenges is that competencies are dispersed across different actors,
internally in the organization and elsewhere. It may not be possible to find guidance in one single
place and in a format that can be used readily, and sometimes it may be contradictory. If you just
build in the short term, you risk accumulating technology liabilities in the long term. There are
simple ways to minimize this risk, e.g., by making contracts and formulating pilot projects.

How: Place a management responsibility in advance. Maturity models and complexity analyses
for organizations and systems help to clearly identify step-by-step development opportunities
and to ensure that challenges are accepted that can be solved and that provide an added value.
Guidance and courses can empower the organization to make decisions that are optimal in the
short and long term.

3.8 Start small, think big

This step entails the following:

What: Plan projects in smaller chunks that can be evaluated continuously and scaled up or down
as needed. Focus on learning while developing organizationally and technically. And do not forget
to share your knowledge of what is not working well. This knowledge is at least as important to the
organization as the successes. In all situations, solutions can be created that have an immediate
potential gain and are relatively easy to implement, because there are mature solutions available
on the market that can be used. These measures should not be slowed down by the absence
of an overall strategy but should instead be used to create learning within the organization and
to provide inputs when developing the strategy. The important thing is to keep the other seven
recommendations in mind in the planning and execution of projects and actions in order to ensure
that the solutions can be included in an overall strategy in the end.

Why: Projects may be so large that it takes too long before the results become visible and can
serve as aims. This is a sort of “strategy sickness”. Projects may also be too small and contribute too
little to the organization's objectives and activities in the long run. This is called “pilot sickness”, or
costly learning, where projects never come into real operation, either because the solution already
existed or because the pilot study conditions do not scale to a more rational operating situation.
For large as well as small projects, this increases costs and risks over time.

How: Start out with simple and mature solutions and find out where the potential is greatest.
Establish reasonable minimum requirements for all initiatives – see recommendations 2 to 7 above
– so that the experiences from one project can feed into other projects. Use a simple but systematic
approach to creation, follow-up, experimentation, testing, unforeseen events, scaling, operation,
integration, and shutdown. Develop skills for testing new ideas quickly and safely. Make sure that
budgeting matches the learning nature of the development process, with changes along the way.

16 Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms