Modernize Your Community Experience and Engage Your Citizens

The smart city is a notion coming to bear, with examples spanning the globe. But at a more granular level, this shift starts in communities. This starts with bridging the digital divide, migrating from legacy systems to the cloud, and delivering your citizens a change they can believe in… that is the path any government is hopeful to take.

For local and state governments, project one is building a foundation for smart and resilient communities. Picture simple and automated networking, inherent network security, scalable and high-performance video surveillance and traffic management, high-performance wireless, unparalleled network visibility as well as centralized management, control and analytics. Quite the vision, but what does this mean for the local population?

In modern society, there is a demand for digital options from restaurants, stores, and any other place that provides a service. The government is no exception to that. Digital alternatives to face-to-face meetings have proven to be the convenient and therefore preferred method of doing most tasks. Therefore, governments that are able to provide their services or meet with constituents with enhanced digital services will be able to directly drive citizen engagement.

Let's dig a little deeper into what a smart community can actually do. With the help of real-time and historical data, you will be able to make decisions that can guide you to make the right decisions that will ultimately lead to benefits that will enable you to enhance the citizen experience within your community. Once you have a strong technology backbone with your community and you start integrating smart technology that can be managed through your cloud management system, the opportunities are endless. Some areas that can be improved include:

• Better traffic flow. Smart technology such as sensors, cameras, IoT-enabled devices, GPS applications, and more can help you better understand what areas of your community that are traffic hot spots, and you can leverage that data to come up with better traffic flows to alleviate some of that traffic build-up. For example, smart traffic lights can leverage real-time data to change light cadence to reduce congestion which can improve citizen experience and minimize air pollution. A win for you and your community.
• Upgraded energy efficiency and health. Artificial intelligence and proactive monitoring affords predictability. With better insight into your network comes the ability to monitor threats around your community before they become serious issues, even outside of cyber threats. You can manage other areas of concern that will allow you to mitigate risks, even ones relating to your energy efficiency or public health concerns.
• Improved safety. Smart communities can use technology and data to decrease the regularity of accidents through better traffic flow, delivering access via live CCTV to first responders before they even get on scene to better assess the situation upon arrival, and much more. Like we said before, the opportunities are endless and your ability to improve safety within your community by interpreting data is just one of the perks of smart communities.

When you take the first steps towards becoming a smart community, you are also taking steps towards creating a more enhanced and safer citizen experience while increasing citizen engagement and creating a community that addresses the concerns of your constituents. At the end of the day, transforming into a smart community is more than infrastructure or technology; it is building a better world. Technology is just one of the tools that can help you get there.