Smarter Cities Challenge – First meeting between the municipal administration and an IBM team of experts

Smarter Cities Challenge program will be sending teams of company experts to five municipalities through 2018 to provide pro bono consultative advice on issues such as affordable housing, economic development, immigration, and public safety.

The five recipients – Busan, Korea; Palermo, Italy; San Isidro, Argentina; San Jose, USA; and Yamagata City, Japan — were selected from a highly competitive pool of more than 100 cities around the world that applied for a grant of consulting services from IBM.

The first meeting between the City Hall – represented by Mayor Leoluca Orlando and the Assessors Iolanda Riolo and Giuseppe Mattina – and a team of experts from the IBM Foundation will start working closely with a team selected by the Municipality.

Palermo is, in fact, the only European city to be chosen from a rose of over 100 cities around the world , among those who had requested to receive IBM consulting services and this year was awarded the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge program, a consultancy worth $ 500,000.

For the upcoming pro bono consultative engagements, IBM may use Watson’s cognitive analytics capabilities to identify and understand city data such as transportation patterns or public health trends. Or, natural and human-influenced meteorological events may be parsed, taken from the world’s largest weather data sets, recorded by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. Analysis of such information may help inform IBM’s recommendation to city stakeholders to address their local challenges.

Here’s how a typical Smarter Cities Challenge engagement works: After intense preparation, IBM Smarter Cities Challenge teams, comprising six IBM experts, spend three weeks working closely with city staff in each winning city, analyzing data about a critical issue facing the municipality. Team members consider diverse perspectives on the topic through meeting with local officials, citizens, businesses, and not-for-profits. Best practices used by other cities are studied. After working closely with city leadership, the IBM team then recommends innovative and specifically tailored ways to address the issue.

Smarter Cities Challenge engagements have helped cities around the world to significantly improve the quality of life for their residents. Projects informed by IBM advice have helped to upgrade skills of city staff, enabled cities to win prestigious awards, and made them more competitive

“We participated in a competition with over a hundred cities around the world and in the end we were the only European city chosen as a smart city, but we were chosen because we are the best wired city in the Mediterranean – said the Mayor -.Few know, but our telematic ring, our broadband that allows us to have free wi-fi areas, have surveillance areas that allow us to have an ever safer city, our real-time connection between offices , our connection with open fiber, are all elements that make Palermo, the best wired city in the Mediterranean.”

The prize for $ 500,000 – lets you have a report on how virtuous the path of Palermo and the capital of the mafia has become Capital of Culture and has also attracted the attention of large companies such as IBM.

The first encounter with IBM’s experts was essentially to comment on the work already done, because we prepared this meeting with a rigorous work that started this afternoon in the concrete with a series of interviews, meetings, communications and then we will present to the city, November 17, the final report.