Page 182 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

Due to the heterogeneity of the systems and the high investments required, it is necessary to
design, as in the strategic formulation of the city, a strategic ICT formulation that establishes the
path of this transformation. In Figure 60, a hypothetical roadmap has been drawn, which, at a high
level, describes the steps necessary for this.

An ICT roadmap must be developed simultaneously and coordinated with the strategic formulation,
due to the strong dependence between the two. Technological leadership and ICT governance
must be closely linked to the area of governance, given that without adequate ICT planning the
priority lines of action could not be developed, and conversely, without defined lines of action,
investments in ICT could not be efficient or adequate for the needs of the city.

Finally, it is important to highlight the need to complement the ICT strategy with the management
of the necessary cultural change in the municipal organization. Legacy systems have been operating
with good performance for a long time, and the organization's logical resistance to change, as
well as its adaptation to new ways of working, represents a challenge that must be evaluated and
managed properly.

8.3.1 Context and Current Diagnosis

This axis is the first element of analysis. The city must evaluate the state of its different information
systems, databases, platform of administrative procedures and if it has geographic information
systems that allow this component to be incorporated into city information.

A situation analysis of the existing systems, their degree of obsolescence, operating costs,
administration and maintenance, and so on, will be carried out. As main points, the ability of
applications to share information in an automated way with external systems through, for example,
Service Bus, ETL, will be analysed.

Next, the best practices will be studied, as well as the different options for the commissioning of a
city platform that allows solving new needs such as interacting with IoT devices, offering Big Data
storage capabilities, analysis, and integration with legacy systems, among other things.

The experiences derived from the smart cities covered in the first report provide some interesting
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insights into where the “Smart City platform market” is at present, along with some of the barriers
that cities face which led to non-deployment (or limited deployment) and how they can be overcome
or mitigated, and what some of the key success criteria and factors for successful implementation
and utilization are.

This analysis must be aligned with the objectives and vision of the city, as well as with the short- and
medium-term needs of the information systems, necessary to support the projects derived from
the priority lines of action.

168 Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC | June 2023