Mobilising intelligence for smarter engagement

Rapid population growth, smart cities and IoT are reliant on the development of visual, spatial and graphical applications. Especially where the digital and physical worlds will underpin the future of economic growth and efficiency gains.

This is time of rapid change, where technology is disrupting how people interact and businesses operate. There are new rules for business and just about everything we knew is on the table for review with the objective towards customer centric contextual communications.

Recently we were investigating the concept of a Local Government spatial data services maturity model. The results from a range of client discussions confirmed digital engagement priorities have shifted more firmly towards:

1. Connected Customers — digital interfaces that are smart enough to conduct an online relationship with the customer and deliver most services
2. Connected Systems — connecting information systems together live, to flow data between them so that information is current and complete in all places
3. Integrated Service Delivery — connecting all service delivery channels so that the customer receives coherent and coordinated experiences via the channel of choice
4. Efficient Service Delivery — understanding and measuring service delivery activities to improve the customer experience being delivered and using this information to reduce costs.

These objectives alone are enough to indicate that GIS Platforms deployed in most Government and Utility organisations including IT and data storage architectures are no longer suitable.

Spatial data Infrastructure may have been satisfying mapping and visualisation for many years for an increasing number of stakeholders, however the speed of, and lack of free-flowing data updates is an impediment.

Heroic has been used to describe the sheer effort to manage the range of applications and maintain data currency in legacy systems. When considering the expectations of Smart Cities residents, businesses, visitors and city services to be connected, there is more need for a leadership role focused on data.

Data needs to be moved to be of value to any organisation. It should not be Static. Rather, managed in terms of Dynamic. Rich data is not just location-based, but also temporal and now includes sensor related inputs.

Informing mobile users on parking availability, traffic congestion, potential flooding alerts, events and road works. At the same time suppling this information in the context of 3D models will severely challenge the scalability of current ICT architecture.

The reliance on the small numbers of GIS practitioners and data scientists has grown enormously. But the data to flow to, and through them, for mobile operations, open data, system integrations and IoT will grow exponentially in the next three to five years.

Mobile users expect accurate and immediate responses to context-based queries in an interface that is accessible anywhere and anytime. They are seldom aware of how challenging it can be to retrieve, process and publish the data from disparate servers and databases to the multitude of available devices and operating systems.

Online users would also not appreciate how large or rich some of these data sets might be, or the incompatible format it was originally supplied in. They don’t care about how the data was served, only the speed at which they can get their answer. Users expect that the data will be accurate.

Is it time for your organisation to review core applications, servers, databases, infrastructure, data sources, processes, 3D and data standards or governance in context to mobility strategies?

RapidMap will be running a series of round table events in the near future with technology specialists including Zebra and 4D Global. If looking for a friendly forum to discuss, register your interest at roundtable@rapidmap.com.au

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