On Monday, Alain Bénichou, President of IBM France, presented Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice and President of the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis, with the recommendation report prepared by the team of IBM experts as part of the “Smarter Cities Challenge ©”.
This global civic engagement initiative, lasting 3 years, will enable 100 cities around the world (based on a competition) to benefit from IBM’s expertise and technology to help address the economic, social, and environmental challenges of the coming years.
Six IBM experts from different countries (Germany, France, India, UK, Switzerland, US) were dispatched to work for three weeks alongside the Nice Côte d’Azur teams. These experts conducted a precise diagnosis of the challenges faced by the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis in terms of sustainable mobility and provided recommendations to build the city of tomorrow.
A smart city uses technology to transform its core systems and optimize limited resources. As cities grow, the systems to manage become more complex, and the amount of information to process increases. The challenge posed by a sustainable future is linked to the ability to transform vast amounts of data into useful knowledge for the service of citizens and the ecosystem that manages and plans the future of our urban territories.
Based on this observation, the team of six IBM consultants conducted a comprehensive analysis of the actions and projects of the Metropolis to formulate their recommendations, notably by leveraging the best practices identified globally by IBM in the field of intelligent transportation.
These recommendations mainly concern three areas:
– Governance: with the proposal to create a center of excellence aimed at coordinating and supporting innovative projects in a transversal manner to prevent systems from operating in isolation from each other;
– Collaboration: with the objectives of defining a common architecture of information to standardize and homogenize new methods of data collection (sensors, traffic, GPS data, etc.), improving communication between the actors of the transportation ecosystem and citizens, and reducing the costs of implementing new services. Citizens must be actors in building the city of tomorrow.
– Intelligent mobility: IBM proposes to create a data platform allowing for a global view of the transport system. This will enable sharing real-time and future transportation conditions with citizens, thus improving travel planning and citizen information.
Following these recommendations, the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis wished to: quickly establish a center of excellence dedicated to innovative projects, build an information architecture to improve citizen mobility, and encourage citizen participation.
Statement from Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice, President of the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis: “As recommended by IBM experts, it is essential that technological solutions are designed to closely meet citizen expectations. Therefore, at my request, the services of the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis will set up, in the coming weeks, a panel of citizens to provide opinions on all components of the smart city.”
And from Alain Bénichou, President of IBM France: “Thanks to this societal engagement program won by the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis, IBM is contributing to the development of the fundamentals of an intelligent transportation system aimed at making Nice Côte d’Azur a reference territory in terms of mobility. In 2012, IBM will continue its commitment to building, city by city, a smarter planet.”
