A quick note about Collaboration
Participation in a user group should be expected by leaders, sponsors and stakeholders as part of every smart city project!
Every smart city project leader should be expected to find an external mentor.
And here’s why…
Smart city (community/place) projects are innovation projects. They are not simple, cookie-cutter low-risk engineering projects; where cost and timelines can be predicted with great accuracy — because “we’ve done this 100 times before…”. One of the key ways to reduce risk for innovation projects is to colloborate. In fact, there are a suite of things to do to de-risk smart city projects; collaboration is a key one!
Collaboration ingredients
Collaborations work best when we have active participation of three groups:
- The old hands (finished their project) now contributing their knowledge.
- The implementers, deep in their projects, now sharing their battles and problems as they go.
- The wannabes who are getting started: creating business cases, designing their solutions and planning their projects.
Collaboration challenges
Each group has its own challenge.
- The old hands don’t get a lot of immediate benefit from contributing to a user group. It’s more about giving back to the community, then having some faith that some future benefits might flow.
Never-the-less, humble old hands will learn from those innovative wannbes who are trying new approaches! - The implementers are often too busy fighting fires and struggling to meet deadlines. This of course is a trap that participation in a users group or users Community of Practice should solve. The cost of keeping your head down, not sharing with others and not leveraging the community knowledge is very high.
- The wannabes are out there but often don’t know where to go for help. The relevant communities of practice don’t know they exist and visa-versa.
In Australia, we don’t have a great collaboration culture. The challenge is to build one. Our leaders need to lean on their staff to collaborate as an ordinary part of their projects and allocate them time to do so. Collaborating with users is different to consulting vendor experts for advice or engaging customers to get the design right.
In Australia we have a heritage of building costly fragmented solutions that only function in isolation; then, at some later stage, trying to fix it with costly harmonisation initiatives that take ages to complete. We often blame a lack of standards for the problem! It’s not. Standards don’t fix the culture. A collaboration culture is a key part of the solution to fragmented ‘solutions’. [It’s not the complete solution. This Digital Transformation example might help.]
Two key questions that don’t help much as much as you hoped…
In Australia, when a new project is proposed we always ask two questions that seem sufficient to get started:
“What have others done?” and “What is best practice?” Then we ask a consultant to answer one or both questions.
For the second question, we may then seek guidance from standards, and Smart City Guidebooks. [These help, but beware of blindly copying other’s smart city initiatives.]
But unfortunately, it is the unpublished stories that are most valuable. People rarely publish their struggles and failures — on websites, papers or at conferences — but will often talk about them in trusted environments. This is the power of collaboration between users.
The questions we always ask are, “What have others done?” and “What is best practice?”
The question we’d really like the answer to is: “What went wrong?”
The publications, conference presentations and success stories make a smart city projects look like plug-and-play… the reality is they rarely are.
The unpublished stories are the most valuable!
The truly valuable lessons don’t lie in the success stories but in the ‘untold’ stories shared amongst users.
The right questions
The question we should ask at the beginning of a smart city project is, “Who can I collaborate with?” and “Where can I meet a user and potential mentor?”
Participation in a user group should be expected as part of every smart city project!
Neil
