About the Engagement
The engagement team worked with one of California’s largest cities and major technology hubs to develop a broadband, digital inclusion, and smart-city strategy. This undertaking demanded a comprehensive exploration of global smart-city and broadband initiatives, and analysis of best practices for attracting business and vendors to bridge the digital divide and implement smart technology.
Business Problem
Broadband and smart-city implementations worldwide are unique to the specific policy, governance, and funding mechanisms of the geography. The engagement team had to research and refine findings to ensure client applicability to support future goals.
Challenges
Due to the nature of broadband and smart-city implementation, the requirements gathering process required a comprehensive review, including constant communication and stakeholder engagement to ensure state and federal compliance and client needs. Another challenge was analyzing robust and geographically varied data to inform the city’s market strategy and solution.
Project Impacts and Outcomes
The engagement team’s analysis laid the foundation for the client to understand the varying components needed for successful implementation of broadband and smart-city solutions like the infrastructure and implementation considerations to bring broadband and smart city infrastructure to the city, and the internal technical and resource capabilities to leverage smart city infrastructure (e.g., with additional data insights, there needs to be the technical infrastructure to analyze data and the resources that conduct data analysis to incorporate into policy and operations). As a result of this analysis, the client incorporated our insights into their long-term plans to make the city an innovation hub.