Page 11 - Policy benchmarks for digital transformation of people-centred cities

1 The need for dynamic policy maturity benchmarking

1.1 What is policy benchmarking?

Policy benchmarking plays a crucial role in evaluating a city's existing policy framework in its ability
to meet the needs of inhabitants, especially in the context of people-centred cities. The ITU’s
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Benchmark for Fifth Generation Digital Collaborative Regulation, also called the G5 Benchmarks,
serves as a national benchmark for inclusive digital transformation across all sectors within a
country's economy and society. This benchmark contains indicators that national regulators and
policy owners can use to self-assess the strength of their policy framework.

In this context, the city's collaborative ecosystem requires an understanding of how policies impact
various domains such as education, health, culture, society, economy, and environment to enable
functioning and people-centric digitalization strategies.

Therefore, it is imperative to stress-test policies for their appropriateness and acceptability and
their potential to enable positive transformations for human benefits. This iterative process of
policy benchmarking should not be seen as a one-time effort but rather as a dynamic, iterative
and continuous process that evolves over time to adapt to changing technological, social and
environmental needs.

In keeping with the growing urban populations, it is essential that strategies that cater to the needs
of inhabitants are based on maturity to policies leveraging fast-paced technological advances. Policy
benchmarking provides a mechanism to do so. Dynamic policy benchmarking, as we present in this
chapter, enables the continuous evolution of existing policies by gaining maturity and adapting to
changing needs, whether technological, social, environmental, or otherwise.

Digital transformation strategies will be using key performance indicators that measure the
outcome of digital implementation of technology and infrastructure, as well as their output. These
can include the broadband bandwidth for individual users or the number of electric vehicles that
can charge on a network station. Dynamic policy maturity benchmarks will be needed to ensure
the inclusive, equitable and socially acceptable implementation of these digitalization strategies.
They will provide governance guidelines and will require stakeholder engagement in government
and the ecosystem to align technology advances with societal agreements.

1.2 What is a Dynamic Policy Maturity Benchmark model?

The concept of a Dynamic Policy Maturity Benchmark model is introduced to ensure sustainable
digital transformation in people-centred cities. This model provides an overarching framework
and principles to guide the development of policies that support such transformation. Given the

1 ITU G5 Benchmark

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