FW: BSI SMART CITIES CONSULTATION

Below are the comments I have submitted today to this consultation on behalf of the TGF TC. The background to this is that the UK Government’s BIS Department has commissioned the British Standards Institute (BSI) to develop a strategy on how standards can support Smart Cities. BSI has recently got to the stage of launching a public consultation on their initial ideas. The material is available here: http://drafts.bsigroup.com/Home/Details/46000.

Chris and I will update you on our call next week on our very productive recent meeting with BSI and provisionally agreed plans for how we might take this forward.

Regards

John

Chair OASIS TGF Technical Committee

m. +(0)44 7976 157745

Skype: gov3john

www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=tgf

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Overview

This is a welcome and timely piece of work. Smart City initiatives are on the increase, in the UK and globally, yet there has been no consistent and holistic approach to understanding what role standards can play in facilitating this process. In general, all the recommended actions in the BSI draft strategy seem sensible. We have four comments: the first is about an important issue which seems to us to be missing from the strategy, and then three areas where we believe that the strategy could benefit from greater alignment with existing relevant work elsewhere.

The key gap: “how to” guidance for those leading Smart Cities initiatives

Much of the strategy focuses on issues of technical interoperability, with the major exception of the recommended work on business models. But the challenges to successful delivery of Smart Cities go much broader than this. Areas where city leaders would welcome further guidance and best practice advice include:

· Benefit realisation strategies for Smart City programmes – ie how to define, measure and track the key outcomes which a Smart City programme may be addressing?

· Developing a Smart City roadmap: Smart City initiatives are multi-year, multi-stakeholder change management programmes – how best to phase these in a way which puts in place the right building blocks at the right stage?

· Stakeholder engagement for Smart Cities: who, how, when?

· Strategies for integrating “Smart” approaches into existing mainstream service delivery

We could list more such challenges. Fundamentally, these are business challenges, not technology ones. And standards may also have a role to play in helping city leaders respond to these challenges.

In particular, we recommend that BSI consider the Transformational Government Framework specification produced by OASIS. This is a business-focused standard looking at all of the governance issues required in a major cross-organisational IT-enabled change programme such as a Smart City initiative. There would be real value in developing a Smart City use case of the TGF, and OASIS would be delighted to consider with BSI how this might best be taken forward.

Figure 1

It is not clear what the vertical bars represent. In the text they are described as the 'vertical channels'. However, they are not channels as that phrase is commonly used in a service delivery context (see for example the Channel Management Framework within the OASIS TGF). Rather they seem to be a representation of siloed-delivery organisations.

If that is the case, we believe it would be more helpful to describe these using the existing taxonomies for UK local government made available at www.esd-toolkit.com, such as the Local Government Category List.

It is also unclear what the horizontal bars are intended to represent. They seem to be domains of information management where Smart City approaches enable particular types of innovation. If that is so, then we are not aware on similar taxonomies elsewhere, so BSI may well be breaking new and helpful ground here. However, to engage in detail with the proposed structure, if it would be helpful if BSI could provide more detail and definition as to what the dimension is intended to represent, and what is intended to be included within each horizontal bar.

Table 1 – Hierarchy of Standards

Is this strictly a hierarchy? Or rather a layered model going from high level governance down through the layers of organisation, management and operations, to the most technical details?

Perhaps more importantly, we recommend that this should be mapped against the five layers of the European Interoperability Framework v2? All EU Member States are due to align their national interoperability strategies with EIF v2 by 2013, and the framework is also widely used as a reference model beyond the EU. We believe that the BSI Smart City strategy would be more powerful if it explicitly mapped relevant standards against this EIF model rather than a new one.

Annex A: Existing standards for governance and risk management

Surely there are many relevant standards beyond those originally developed by BSI?

Although ISO 38500 and 38502 (concerning governance of IT) are relatively lightweight, they should be included - as should standards coming from ohter recognised bodies such as ITU (the ODP standards), HL7 (such as the SAIF work), as well as standards from OMG, the Open Group or OASIS

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