Smart city products and services cut across several city systems and benefit several different agencies. They are also pioneering and are very different from typical products and services. Because of this it’s not appropriate for cost and management issues to be borne by a single agency and is difficult to use a conventional ROI model.
The key aim of this work is to give guidance on the investment case to the CFO of the various agencies concerned, as well as potential investors, on how best to assess the business case for the proposed initiative. This work will also provide guidance to City Council Leaders on how to assess the likely wider economic and social benefits.
In addition to this, the work will outline options for how smart city products or services can be paid for, given that the benefits will be spread over a number of agencies. It will deal with identifying the most appropriate packages of investment funding, the circumstances where a joint venture might be more appropriate than direct procurement, and how the managers for the different agencies that would need to implement or manage or benefit from the new product or service could come together in a way that would allow them to form a joint customer for it.
On 7 October 2013, BSI held a workshop to engage around these key issues and draw priorities for further standardization work around this area. The output from this workshop can be found here:
