Enabling Smart Cities:Emerging Technologies and the importance of Data

The way that we work and live continues to gather pace, we know as customers and citizens that we expect more than we have ever done before. Whether it is: access to healthcare, education, banking services, TV and news on the go, through to selecting holidays, hotels and restaurants… the list is almost endless.

Today, technology enables much of what we do, what is not always so obvious is the value of the data that underpins our choices.

Much has been written about the exponential growth in data volumes that are driven, in part by the digitisation of products and services. Organisations across public and private sectors continue to examine new ways of driving commercial and societal advantage from its use.

We know that data is a real asset to organisations, we know that enterprises have often found it hard to identify, manage and exploit and we know we are going to see more and more of it.

With the advent of emerging technologies our contention is twofold:

When we look ahead across the market place, what do we see? And how can organisations best prepare themselves for the challenges and opportunities provided by the introduction of emerging technologies?

We hear much about the likes of blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and now increasingly about 5G, especially as the UK rollout has now officially started. Let’s take a closer look at 5G, this next generation communications technology promises much. It has the capability to remove the connectivity barriers that our current infrastructure provides. The 5G performance increases are significant and across both b2b as well as b2c markets. Notably the advent of 5G is seen as a key enabler for ‘Smart Cities’ and what has more widely termed ‘Connected Communities’.

It is notable that the UK Government’s department for Digital Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) are also focusing on rural areas across the UK to ensure true geographic rather than simply population coverage.