A tale of two smart cities: Manchester and Australia’s Casey
Summary
Speaking in the UK parliament during a debate on smart city development in June 2019, Lisa Cameron, a shadow spokesperson on mental health for the SNP, painted a rosy picture of 5G’s potential impact on local government services. Following a cross-party UK-US parliamentary group fact-finding mission in May, Cameron said that “with 5G, people will be able to control their home and car – everything – from a single device.” She was clearly sold a utopian vision by the “technology leaders in the mid-west” and, to a large extent, this is the problem with the smart cities idea. While the government aims to increase R&D allocations to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 (the OECD baseline), Skidmore claimed that to reach the £60bn R&D target, “we must convince SMEs to change their business models and recognise the value of research and development”. “It’s really difficult,” says Bob Brown, Manchester City Council’s former CIO (he is now chief solutions officer at Emis Health), referring to the dual challenge of keeping council leaders and residents happy, while at the same time providing a foundation for change. “The organisation was experiencing system failure on a regular basis, which of course represented a broad financial and reputational risk to the council.” While the IT team stabilised the problems through a traditional IT infrastructure with separate servers and storage, last year it struck a deal to install Nutanix’s AHV Hypervisor.