Melbourne's digital smart city strategy

The Victorian capital aims to lead the way in providing improved experiences for residents, visitors and businesses through judicious use of technology.

In late-2015, Melbourne became just the second city in the world — after Brisbane — to appoint a chief digital officer (CDO). That person is Michelle Fitzgerald, recently named as one of Australia’s Knowledge Nation top 100 influencers.

A Melbourne native, Fitzgerald began her career in technology working with start-ups in the dotcom years of the late 1990s, initially in Melbourne and then in the UK and US. Most recently she was a digital expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers, specialising in the financial services field.

Regarding those boom and bust years of the late 1990s, “What was interesting about them was we had a really big, bold agenda for how technology would transform the way we work, live and play,” she said. “And I think what was missing were the devices that allowed us to do that well. [But] with the advent of smartphones, iPads and so on, we’ve actually hit a bit of a tipping point in recent years.

“In Australia we’ve got the highest penetration of smartphones in the world, and we’re one of the most urbanised societies in the world,” Fitzgerald added. “So I think that puts us in a unique position in terms of our ability to capitalise on the opportunities digital presents to us, this time around.”

So just what does Melbourne hope to achieve with its ‘smart city’ focus, and what will it involve?

“For us it’s about integrating physical, digital and human systems to deliver a leading city,” said Fitzgerald. “Digital is just an enabler to the human experience of the city.

“If you think about what Melbourne’s known for and famous for, we’re a design city, we’re a city of hidden laneways, hidden bars, hidden rooftops. We’re a connected city — there are kind of one or two degrees of separation between every Melburnian, even if they’re relatively new in town. So for us it’s about building on the existing strengths of our city.

“We’re quite well known for our sciences community,” she added. “For example, in the precinct around Melbourne University there are about 10,000 life science professionals. So for us it’s about capitalising on existing strengths. We’re not about trying to outdo New York or Tel Aviv, it’s about Melbourne’s version of a smart city.

“Secondly, it’s about how do we further activate the economy around us, whether it’s local start-ups and local universities and other business, but doing that in a way that improves the city experience for Melbourne residents, ratepayers, tourists, students etcetera,” she added. “The role of the City of Melbourne in that is to provide the platform and to help create the ecosystem, but do it in partnership with others.”

So what can the City of Melbourne do for start-ups and other businesses that they can’t do for themselves?

“There are a couple of layers to that. If you look at start-ups as an example, we’ve got hundreds of start-ups already operating in Melbourne,” said Fitzgerald. “We’ve spoken with them and the feedback we get is that there’s a role for government, but when you split it down to federal, state, local, there is a distinct view on what each layer can provide.

“In terms of the City of Melbourne, we provide the ‘licence to operate’ within the physical environment of the city,” she added. “So the role for us is helping third parties appropriately access infrastructure and communities. We can help local start-ups connect to other customers and suppliers, and we can be a customer for them. So anything we do around the smart city agenda, we’re seeking as much as possible to appropriately engage local businesses.

“For example, we work with a number of suppliers who support our physical infrastructure, many whom are based in the City of Melbourne. These suppliers employ local staff, some of them have local data centres, and they’re just down the road if we need to meet with them to resolve an issue. So we’re not only supporting local suppliers, which activates our local economy — there are efficiency benefits as well.

“The way we’re looking at this is, digital is everyone’s responsibility in our organisation, [just as] customers are everyone’s responsibility,” she added. “We don’t want to digitise everything for digital’s sake, because that human experience is still important and we need to provide our customers with an omnichannel experience with council. So we’ll continue to provide phone-based services, face-to-face services, etc.

“But it is about us being really smart about how we leverage digital to help our customers self-serve where they want to,” she said. “And further automating internal processes that are going to deliver greater efficiency and better outcomes for our ratepayers.

“The city’s ratepayers include residents, landlords and businesses small and large. But there’s another layer of who’s actually using the city day to day — tourists, international students, people going to and from work; so we have broad definition of our customer base,” said Fitzgerald.

Taking tech to the people

The City of Melbourne recently partnered with Telstra on an Internet of Things Challenge, which involved about 80 participants.

“What was interesting was that the audience was 50/50 technologists and designers, and that was very deliberate on our part,” said Fitzgerald. “To us it’s not just about technology for the sake of it, it’s about creating a beautiful experience for the end user, [such that] they might not even connect with the fact that they’re engaging with technology.

“The breadth of responses we received ranged from the elaborate through to the very simple. We had one team that designed a tic-tac-toe game that you could play in, say, the Royal Botanic Gardens, and connect with someone sitting in a park in Madrid or Barcelona.”

Another of the solutions concerned rubbish disposal. “This concept addressed reducing what was put out as waste, and incentivising residents around that. It was encouraging them to reduce waste first and foremost, and to combine bins, so that rubbish trucks could stop fewer times,” said Fitzgerald. “And the actual collection was demand driven, which meant that the bin collecting companies could optimise the routes and do it based on when the bin needs to be collected, as opposed to once per week.

“We’ve now got sensors in a lot of our rubbish bins for that reason, so that the bin will tell the third party collecting the waste when it’s full. And they can start to plan their routes around that.”

What does Fitzgerald say to those who are concerned that our cities are becoming Big Brother environments, where everything is being monitored?

“That’s why we’re really emphasising the human side of our digital smart city agenda,” she said. “The thing we’re trying to do here is value the human experience over all else. And that includes in my mind, being conscious of where people do and don’t see a role for technology. “What is underpinning our smart city agenda and smart cities around the world is what we call the open data platform. [That] includes putting the right mechanisms in place to protect privacy, security and so on,” she said. “So it’s about appropriate use of data, and using data in a way that creates a better experience of the city for human beings, and we’ll never ever lose sight of that.”

What are some of the things the City of Melbourne is hoping to achieve in 2016?

“First of all, starting with a customer-led experience to inform everything we do for the City of Melbourne in this digital space,” she said. “We also want to make sure we get that balance of enhancing essential services, and doing some things that are really special for Melbourne. So [for example], fixing some of the basics around further automating council services so that our customers can self-serve 24/7.

“For instance with graffiti we found that people often want to report it on the weekend, out of hours when our contact centre is closed,” she added. “How do we better leverage digital so that it’s easier to use a smartphone to report graffiti? So you could take a photo of it and we can geolocate it, that sort of thing.

“The other thing we’re doing is continuing to partner with start-ups and the universities. Universities are really investing in the innovation space, and the recent innovation statement from the federal government is going to accelerate that,” said Fitzgerald. “And we really believe in the value of partnerships.

Finally, in 10 years’ time, does Fitzgerald think that all local governments will have chief digital officers?

“There are two scenarios. One is that everyone will have one. The second is that no-one will have one,” said Fitzgerald. “Where no-one has one is where we’ll have got to the point of maturity, [where] the whole organisation has a natural tilt toward digital such that you don’t need one person or one team championing it on behalf of the organisation.”