Page 23 - Guide for smart and sustainable city leaders: Envisioning sustainable digital transformation

Guide for smart and sustainable city leaders: Envisioning sustainable digital transformation

Step 7 – Measure your city progress

The step consists of monitoring and evaluating the smart city work programme required to
achieve the targets. This stage involves close coordination and collaboration among SSC
stakeholders, as well as an assessment on the basis of relevant KPIs. ITU-T Study Group 20
“Internet of Things and Smart Cities & Communities” has developed a useful set of KPIs for SSCs,
including Recommendation ITU-T Y.4903 “Key performance indicators for smart sustainable
cities to assess the achievement of sustainable development goals” that can be utilized for this
specific step. These KPIs have been further streamlined within the United for Smart Sustainable
Cities initiative (U4SSC), a UN initiative coordinated by ITU, UNECE and UN-HABITAT, and
supported by other 16 other United Nations agencies and programmes, based on the feedback
received from cities which have implemented the KPIs. More than 150 cities worldwide have
adopted these KPIs, thus far. These KPIs form an excellent baseline for city decision makers, as
they map their city's progress of their overall SSC journey, but can also be modified by cities
to suit their own specific circumstances. Within, this step, it would also be beneficial to plan for
data aggregation and discovery, which would facilitate downstream evaluation.

Step 8 – Ensure accountability and responsibility

The last step is focused on evaluating, reporting and learning from the SSC process and related
experiences. This involves an assessment of the implementation of the work programme and
an analysis of reflections about strengths and shortcomings. Such an evaluation contributes
to informing the decision-making process of the local council, as well as to informing the
preparation of future baseline reviews to deepen SSC master plans and strengthen the digital
transformation process.

Better decisions are reached if they emerge out of a process of knowledge sharing and dialogue
between stakeholders, in particular the Disabled People Organisations (DPO). The reflective
process of evaluation will feed into a process of continuous learning, which, in turn, will influence
and inform the development of the future vision and strategy for the SSC.
Cities need to review and learn from each stage of the SSC process. For this they can implement
a series of reflections on progress, document lessons learned and steps to improve on future
iterations of the SSC journey. Consequently, cities must be accountable for continuous
improvement to strengthen the effectiveness of future SSC strategies. To do this, city leaders
must be flexible and able to adapt to the dynamic, evolving and complex nature of the SSC
and be able to continuously update the vision as required.

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