The year 2020 has dramatically changed how technology is impacting everyday life. Whether it is video conferencing for remote work and home schooling or getting curbside deliveries, COVID19 has ushered in a new normal and pushed us to adopt technology faster than we ever imagined. It has also increased what we expect from our “smart cities”. If we adopt new technology quickly, why can’t our smart cities transform quickly, too? Are cities up to the tech challenge? Let’s find out.
Nicole Raimundo, the Chief Information Officer of the Town of Cary in North Carolina and an award winning technology executive, answered a few questions and shed light on what officials are doing to adopt technology that can improve the city’s infrastructure and citizen’s life. Let’s uncover the real benefits and challenges in implementing IoT and smart city initiatives and how has COVID19 impacted these efforts?
SUMMARY
- You certainly don’t want someone from IT writing your Facebook posts and your Twitter feed.
- Adding IT and Marketing together makes us be able to deliver the best product to our community.
- ‘It really takes a pandemic for people to appreciate IT.’
- We understand the importance of that working with our partners, we make the whole region stronger.
- The keyword here is ‘plan’.
- Don’t be afraid to ask the questions; don’t be afraid to say, ‘I’m not really sure.’ They are all still learning and going through it.
WHAT IS THE TRANSITION LIKE TO COME FROM PRIVATE SECTOR TO BEING A GOVERNABLE IN PUBLIC SECTOR?
I spent a good amount of time in the private sector, actually relocating from Boston to the Raleigh area about 16 years ago. I had the opportunity to join a private company and loved my time there. Then I transitioned to do work in the public sector, and you do it for the love and the passion that you are helping your community. That was something that was very enticing and important to me. I spent several years in Raleigh before I transitioned to Cary as their CIO, now five years ago.
We are very fortunate in Cary to have IT centralized. I am responsible for the strategic direction, the vision, as well as all the deployment of IT across the organization. A year ago, I was also given the opportunity to have a marketing team underneath me. It’s something unique in government, although more entities are making the shift from the “Public Information Office” to more of a robust marketing team, and I am glad we are doing that here in Cary.
HOW DOES TECHNOLOGY GET COMMUNICATED IN THE WALLS OF MARKETING ?
If you think about the work that we do, a lot of it is citizen facing. There’s lots of work around social aspects as well as all our live meetings. When you think about those together, you really need that marketing arm. You certainly don’t want someone from IT writing your Facebook posts and your Twitter feed. There’s a good synergy between both. We use Amazon, Alexa, and Google. When you think about using those virtual assistant tools, you need those marketing campaigns to help share the information with your community. For me, it’s a perfect blend and all the tools that they use are all technology tools. It’s been amazing, and I’m loving having them as part of our team, it adds a whole different dynamic to the group.
When you think about alignment, you start thinking more about marketing where they’re very used to storyboarding, journey mapping, really thinking about things. In our case, from that citizen perspective, we do a lot of work as we develop solutions for our citizens. We walk through beginning to end – the day in the life approach – which is something that’s not always on the forefront of just the technology team, because they’re all about implementation. Adding those two together makes us be able to deliver the best product to our community.
CAN YOU GIVE US SOME EXAMPLES OF WHAT YOU DID AS ‘GOVREBEL’?
The GovRebel moment came about a few years ago when our teams were starting to push the boundaries; it was looking at virtual assistance, it was looking at two-way text messaging. For us, it was all about taking the chances to do things and pushing forward. But at the same time, we were experimenting with IOT, and we had converted our campus into a living lab. While even our own internal staff didn’t understand what that was or why we were in their minds wasting time doing this, I kept saying, ‘we’re just rebels.’ Sometimes just to get a push through the torrent, tune that noise in your head out of what people are saying. They don’t understand it, so you have to bring them along. If you don’t keep moving forward, you’re never going to progress.
It was all about taking those steps and being able to take that risk, knowing that you might have to burden some of that on your shoulders. We like to think about it as being a little bit rebellish, like, “who cares what people say, this is what we’re going to do. We know it’s the right thing. We’re just going to keep pushing forward!” This mindset helps us get over the hurdles sometimes that we hear and deliver.
DID THIS MINDSET HELP YOU COPE WITH THIS COVID19 SITUATION ANY BETTER WAY?
I always say, “it really takes a pandemic for people to appreciate IT.” Because we were able to move everyone quickly. We came in on Friday, and our CEO/Town Manager said, “everybody’s gonna work from home starting Monday.” Now, no one knew for how long. No one knew what that looked like. He said, “work Monday and then take your stuff with you.” Because we had prepared, not necessarily for the pandemic, but we had prepared in terms of having strategies in place for “work anywhere,” which means that everybody has some sort of device, whether it’s a laptop, or iPads, like our field workers, everyone needs some type of device that they can use in the fields. It also means moving our applications to the cloud and having a robust security program.
We were fortunate that we had these things in place which made the transition easier. What we learned is that we have lots of different folks within the organization with different roles. We have some who need large monitors, like our planners who are looking at big site plans, and their laptops screen are really not going to cut in. One of the things that we put in place was a drive-up service. As our buildings are closed and we don’t want people inside our buildings, we would schedule the ability for one of our staff to go get anything the employee might need to work from home.
We started to look at solutions that weren’t typically used in government and flip them so that we could use queuing solutions to start to deliver services. There’s services that we need to keep in place such as our delivering records to our police department; we needed to be able to flip a service so that we could deliver what our customers need. We don’t want people in our building so we could schedule them for pickup. It was like thinking about things you may see in a different industry and use it in a slightly different manner. And how can you translate that to now deliver services to keep the town moving forward. The best that we can while we’re all working remote. We implemented the whole logistics and the curbside delivery of their assets within the government building.
HOW IS IoT HELPING YOU AND YOUR TEAM ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS?
We started with our campus, and we started trying to figure out ‘what is this smart city buzzword?’ It felt a little bit like the start of the internet. I kept thinking this is not going away, it’s going to be around, and what are all the components of it? Fortunately for our location, we’re right outside of Research Triangle Park, which houses lots of technology companies. We also have great universities around us and some great non-profits. We gathered a bunch of experts, whether it was from some of the large corporations like Cisco, NCRiot, or our educational partners at NC State, Duke and UNC, and they helped us formulate a plan. That’s where we came up to use the testing ground. Even to Cisco, all of this was new to them. We came up with this plan to leverage our campus, which represents the city just on a much smaller scale. We’ve got parking and ground sorts of lighting, etc. We designed a contract that allowed folks to come in and test their technologies either at no cost or very minimal cost. The important thing about all of that was the learning that came out of it. We’ve got crazy things on our campus. We have an IoT pest control and call them IOT Rat Traps, and we gave them a place to learn about using their system in different environments. We’ve also learned about security. We learned about the importance of open APIs. We want to be able to access the data. We want to make sure we’ve got security at all layers. We’ve learned things as it’s matured, every offering seems to want to be a standalone offering of a dashboard with analytics.
It’s all packaged up nicely, which is great for some people, but it is not great for us, because we are looking at a platform strategy. We want to make sure that we can just get the data, ingest the data, and push it out to whatever applications we want to. That was one of the greatest learnings that we’ve had because we certainly, at the end of the day, don’t want to manage another hundred applications. That’s just not sustainable for our staff, and I don’t think it’s sustainable for any municipality. So we really need to think about making sure that you understand your data, making sure that you can have easy access to that data, and then think about what’s going to be your analytics platform. The last thing that we want is to have an emergency command center or 311 center is like a hundred different dashboards up and that just doesn’t help. We want it all on one or as limited as we can get it.
The other thing that is critical for folks that are entering this world and especially for municipalities because we are funded by our citizens. I take it very seriously, the money that we do spend. It was important for us to try to do this in little to no cost. The other thing was that our council and mayor, and our town manager all saw and experienced what we were doing on campus and the thoughtfulness of it. We never asked for money to just do something. We gained all of their trust and their buy-in. Now when we go and ask for money, they know that we’ve done the hard work behind it, and it’s taken a couple of years to do that, but it’s been worth it. They know that we’ve done all of our due diligence over the years. That buy-in is critical, and that was really important for us, that we gained everyone’s support in the manner in which we did this.
HOW HAS THIS HELPED IN FUNCTIONING OF THE GOVERNMENT OR THE LIVES OF THE CITIZENS?
One of these cases is rain sensors – we have put in rain gauges and water sensors, or gauges in our basins where the carriers are at the top of the basin, and we like everybody else experience flooding not to the extreme as some other municipalities, but if it’s your home and you get flooded, that’s one of our citizens and we don’t ever want to see that happen. We know that this is a big problem universally. We got the sensors in place so that we are able to get you to a place where we’ll be able to do predictive – instead of being simply reactive.
The interesting thing to me about this project is that when we think about our own personal lives and where we traveled throughout the day, maybe not so much these days, but it typically isn’t within the border of a town. We understand the importance of working with our partners that we make the whole region stronger. We have worked with the communities around us on the flooding, so that we can share data with them and alert them if something like flooding comes downstream to them. It’s very critical if you can work with your partners around to set data standards.
When we did this and worked through the storm water, we didn’t ask anyone to buy any new solutions. Use whatever it is that you have. Our goal was to share information, not make someone buy a new product. We were able to do that, to get agreements in place with the state, with all the municipalities around us. We spent a long time working with our neighbors around us to come up with a use case. Once you get that trust and you can get those terms in place and everyone understands, they don’t have to buy a new platform or new solutions. The importance of being able to share this data is gonna grow the strength in the region. As much as we want to instrument Cary to be a hundred percent IoT someday, we also see the importance of doing it with our communities because we drive through one community to another.
Cary also provides dispatch services for our surrounding communities. We’ve got fire and police going to different locations. All these things are critical when you start to think about IoT – it’s the data that is critical for sharing, to get the data and be able to take action on that data. When a flood is coming, if we can get the alerts via the data, out system generates a ticket to our public works so that they can go set up roadblocks. The same for police, so that they know where flooding is likely to occur. And it can also go to our traffic group to manage any signals near there to keep vehicles from going in there. It’s all about the automation that you build in that can save lives. These are the use cases that come out of it.
HOW DO YOU SEE AI AND 5G COMING INTO YOUR PLANNING AND FUTURE?
5G will be interesting. I’m interested to see how that will roll out. I don’t know in Cary so much because we’re very connected, how much impact that can be, but I can see that with our surrounding communities that don’t have the same connectivity that we have. I think about 5G now with kids at home and how we can figure out how to leverage that, especially in rural communities. It’s interesting that we could use it in places during any type of emergency. We’ve got a bunch of drones that our different departments use, but you can spin those up in an emergency to create a network if you need to, like if networks go down, at the time of natural disasters when tower sites and things could go down. It’s going to be interesting to see how that actually plays out.
AI for me is interesting because people talk about it a lot and it’s amazing. But nobody ever talks about making sure that your data is good and clean. That data validation goes up-front. I’m always a little tentative on that, because I certainly don’t want it to produce a result that is inaccurate. Nobody seems to really talk about that a lot.
CAN YOU DO PREDICTIVE PATTERNS WITH AI AND IoT THAT CAN BRING ANOTHER LAYER OF INTELLIGENCE IN TERMS OF PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS?
It’s interesting. In our stormwater water-leveling project we’re using SaaS to build models that also bringing in the weather data, to get to that point where to model is predictive, it’s just gonna take some time to get there. Everyone thinks sometimes things are easy and then you have these little gotchas. I share that because we had put in our water sensors in the basins, maybe it was early spring or late winter. It was thrown off the gauges because we didn’t think about the fact that there might be interference from whatever vegetation might grow. We’ve had to go back and actually move some of them. It’s been a great lesson learned, but it’s one of those simple things. It’s like, we just didn’t think about the fact that there’s going to be things that grow.
HOW ARE BRINGING THE CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL ALIGNMENT IN THINKING THE RIGHT WAY IN COMMON DIRECTION, ADOPTING ALL THE TECHNOLOGIES TOGETHER?
It was indeed a challenge. We have a very robust, smart, and connected community committee. That has representation from every department across the organization. Most of them are some sort of data owner. They meet once a month because it’s all about education and learning processes, often departments hold one piece, beginning, middle or end. They don’t know what happens on the other sides of it. It’s walking through those use cases with them, getting them to understand how they can use automation to streamline processes.
We just went through an exercise where we have collected the information on every application that we own and the data standards and everything to do with these applications and we just create a Salesforce app for it. That allows complete transparency for the whole organization to see everything that we own. We’ve got lots of fields in there and say, ‘okay, this is ready to move to a platform.’ You can see where there may be duplicate efforts because often in municipalities you might have a work order system for public works and then a work order type system for planning that are workflows. We think about it from the data flow, and how we collapse and create and put all of our data on platforms. So having this committee that meets, and then they talk about where they can see uses has been amazing because it’s collapsed the silos for us.
Now it’s taken a lot of work for everyone to want to share. “This is my application and traffic. I don’t want anybody to touch it or see it,” but now they understand the benefit that they also gained by opening up that information and then receiving information from other systems as well. So it’s a lot like you gotta show also and build a culture of sharing and a culture that understands the benefit of the collective good, as opposed to their own individual silos.
IF YOU HAD TO TELL SOMETHING TO OTHER MUNICIPALITIES THAT ARE JUST GETTING STARTED ON ‘SMART CITIES’, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY THEY SHOULD DO TO PLAN PROPERLY?
The keyword here is ‘plan’. There are several things. You can leverage your partners that are around you. Don’t be afraid to ask the questions; don’t be afraid to say, ‘I’m not really sure.’ There’s lots of people around you, whether it’s universities that are testing things, there are big companies that are still learning and going through it. The other thing is to think about your town, city, County, whatever it may be as one big entity, and try to look for solutions to problems that way so that you’re not putting in siloed solutions. So that you’re not just putting in parking or lighting or environmental censoring. You need to walk through those use cases of how important all of that data is connected and make sure that you’re buying platforms and solutions that are easily able to share that data because the benefit is the ability to aggregate and share data across the town. And then move out right across the County, across the state. That’s where you’re going to get the big benefits that everybody wants to see that you gotta be able to have open APIs and solutions that you can share that data.
This is how the town of Cary and the neighboring areas are benefiting by not only flipping the approach to service delivery, but also recognizing how sharing IoT data can reduce complexity.
