SMART CITIES FRAMEWORK

Chris

I've read through the draft SCF and have a few questions/observations which you might wish to think about before our TGF TC call on Thursday.

1. I appreciate it is very topical to talk about Smart Cities these days but surely there is no reason why the SCF is not applicable to any town, municipality or other community? I'm not suggesting changing the title or use of the words Smart Cities throughout the document, but why not acknowledge up front that although the focus is primarily on Cities it can also be used by any other level of local government.

2. Should we ask BSI to consider the new material produced by Mark and yourself on Benefits Realisation?

3. The Guiding Principles contain no acknowledgement of the need by Cities to meet national and EC commitments eg green targets, waste re-cycling targets, etc. These can impact the vision and roadmap and cannot be ignored by citizens and businesses if they are looking to help develop services. I think something about this needs to be said in the Stakeholder Engagement section, eg make sure all stakeholders are aware of these commitments which can impact the delivery and priority of services.

4. There is nothing comparable to the TGF Pattern 18 on Skills. The SCF says a bit on leadership skills but our pattern relates to the wider issue of skills shortages and I would have thought local authorities suffer from that more than central government. Is this a deliberate omission or an oversight?

5. Page 11, Title B7 - the wording of the title is wrong and should be Common terminology and reference model.

Apart from these I think the SCF looks to be a very solid piece of work and sets a very good template for us to follow with TGF v2. It is however quite a lengthy document and suffers from the problem of needing a "simple read version" that we have already discussed about TGF v2. I don't know there's an easy answer to this as any 60+ page document is going to be a hard read. I'm not suggesting we raise this with BSI in our response but if we do a single merged TGF v2 document it does show that we will face this problem and somehow we need to try and overcome the issue.

John

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