Tag: TechnicityTO

We had a quick review of the City’s Administrative Penalty System (APS), which lets you pay or dispute your parking ticket online, with a panel made up of Lenny Di Marco, senior systems integrator; Kelli Chapman, director of prosecution services; and Susan Garossino, director of court services.

Technologically, this was a challenge to integrate old COBOL systems and newer systems across both city and provincial agencies, but there was also a cultural change to do some level of dispute resolution online rather than in the courts. Paying online isn’t new (I seem to remember paying a ticket online years ago when I still had a car), but the process of requesting a review and appealing a review result now happens in a matter of weeks rather than years. In addition to the obvious benefit of a timely outcome – which is better for citizens to get things sorted out, for the city in terms of resolving tickets faster, and for police officers who don’t have to attend court if the issue is resolved online — this also frees up court time for more serious charges. It’s still possible to do this in person, but a lot of people don’t have the time to get to a city office during business hours, or don’t want to go through the face-to-face process.

This is not just a matter of keeping up with regular day-to-day parking violations, but managing peaks that occur when the city has ticketing blitzes (usually caused when an elected official wants to make a statement about being tough on parking offenders).

The whole project took 12-14 months from inception to rollout, and is based on integrating and extending their COBOL back end and other existing systems, rather than purchasing new technology or bringing in outside help. Definitely some technology challenges, but also assessing the needs of the stakeholders from the city, the province and the police so that they can do their job including the new online review and adjudication roles.

Cool stuff, even if you don’t like paying parking tickets. Sounds like they’re already working on another integration project for next year related to Vision Zero, although we didn’t get the details.

The day at Technicity 2016 finished up with two panels: the first on challenges and opportunities, and the second on digital change agents.

The challenges and opportunities panel, moderated by Jim Love of IT World Canada, was more of a fireside chat with Rob Meikle, CIO at City of Toronto, and Mike Williams, GM of Economic Development and Culture, both of whom we heard from in the introduction this morning. Williams noted that they moved from an environment of few policies and fewer investements under the previous administration to a more structured and forward-thinking environment under Mayor John Tory, and that this introduced a number of IT challenges; although the City can’t really fail in the way that a business can fail, it can be ineffective at serving its constituents. Meikle added that they have a $12B operating budget and $33B in capital investments, so we’re not talking about small numbers: even at those levels, there needs to be a fair amount of justification that a solution will solve a civic problem rather than just buying more stuff. This is not just a challenge for the City, but for the vendors that provide those solutions.

There are a number of pillars to technological advancement that the City is striving to establish:

• be technologically advanced and efficient in their internal operations
• understand and address digital divides that exist amongst residents
• create an infrastructure of talent and services that can draw investment and business to the City

This last point becomes a bit controversial at times, when there is a lack of understanding of why City officials need to travel to promote the City’s capabilities, or support private industry through incubators. Digital technology is how we will survive and thrive in the future, so promoting technology initiatives has widespread benefits.

There was a discussion about talent: both people who work for the City, and bringing in businesses that draw private-sector talent. Our now-vibrant downtown core is attractive for tech companies and their employees, fueled by our attendance at our universities. The City still has challenges with procurement to bring in external services and solutions: Williams admitted that their processes need improvement, and are hampered by cumbersome procurement rules. Democracy is messy, and it slows things down that could probably be done a lot faster in a less free state: a reasonable trade. 🙂

The last session of the day looked at examples of digital change agents in Toronto, moderated by Fawn Annan of IT World Canada, and featuring Inspector Shawna Coxon of the Toronto Police Service, Pam Ryan from Service Development & Innovation at the Toronto Public Library, Kristina Verner, Director Intelligent Communities of Waterfront Toronto, and Sara Diamond, President of OCAD University. I’m a consumer and a supporter of City services such as these, and I love seeing the new ways that they’re using to include all residents and advance technology. Examples of initiatives include fiber broadband for all waterfront community residences regardless of income level; providing mobile information access to neighbourhood police officers to allow them to get out of their cars and better engage with the community; integrating arts and design education with STEM for projects such as transit and urban planning (STEAM is the new STEM); and digital innovation hubs at some library branches to provide community access to high-tech gadgets such as 3D printers.

There was a great discussion about what it takes to be a digital innovator in these contexts: it’s as much about people, culture and inclusion as it is about technology. There are always challenges in measuring success: metrics need to include the public’s opinion of these agencies and their digital initiatives, an assessment of the impact of innovation on participants, as well as more traditional factors such as number of constituents served.

That’s it for Technicity 2016, and kudos to IT World Canada and the City of Toronto for putting this day together. I’ve been to a couple of Technicity conferences in the past, and always enjoy them. Although I rarely do work for the public sector in my consulting business, I really enjoy seeing how digital transformation is occuring in that sector; I also like hearing how my great city is getting better.

I missed a couple of sessions, but made it back to Technicity in time for a panel on IoT moderated by Michael Ball of AGF Investments, featuring Zahra Rajani, VP Digital Experience at Jackman Reinvents, Ryan Lanyon, Autonomous Vehicle Working Group at City of Toronto, and Alex Miller, President of Esri Canada. The title of the panel is Drones, Driverless Cars and IoT, with a focus is on how intelligent devices are interacting with citizens in the context of a smart city. I used to work in remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS), and having the head of Esri Canada talk about how GIS acts as a smart fabric on which these devices live is particularly interesting to me. Miller talked about how there needs to be a framework and processes for enabling smarter communities, from observation and measurement, data integation and management, visualization and mapping, analysis and modeling, planning and design, and decision-making, all the way to action. The vision is a self-aware community, where smart devices that are built into infrastructure and buildings can feed back into an integrated view that can inform and decide.

Lanyon talked about autonomous cars in the City of Toronto, from the standpoint of the required technology, public opinion, and cultural changes away from individual car ownership. Rajani followed with a brief on potential digital experiences that brands create for consumers, then we circled back to the other two participants about how the city can explore private-public sensor data sharing, whether for cars or retail stores or drones. They also discussed issues of drones in the city: not just regulations and safety, but the issue of sharing space both on and above the ground in a dense downtown core. A golf cart-sized pizza delivery robot is fine for the suburbs with few pedestrians, but just won’t work on Bay Street at rush hour.

The panel finished with a discussion on IoT for buildings, and the advantages of “sensorizing” our buildings. It goes back to being able to gather better data, whether it’s external local factors like pollution and traffic, internal measurements such as energy consumption, or visitor stats via beacons. There are various uses for the data collected, both by public and private sector organizations, but you can be sure that a lot of this ends up in those silos that Mark Fox referred to earlier today.

The morning finished with a keynote by John Tory, the mayor of Toronto. This week’s shuffling of City Council duties included designating Councillor Michelle Holland as Advocate for the Innovation Economy, since Tory feels that the city is not doing enough to enable innovation for the benefit of residents. Part of this is encouraging and supporting technology startups, but it’s also about bringing better technology to bear on digital constituent engagement. Just as I see with my private-sector clients, online customer experiences for many services are poor, internal processes are manual, and a lot of things only exist on paper. New digital services are starting to emerge at the city, but it’s a bit of a slow process and there’s a long road of innovation ahead. Toronto has made committments to innovation in technology as well as arts and culture, and is actively seeking to bring in new players and new investments. Tory sees the Kitchener-Waterloo technology corridor as a partner with the Toronto technology ecosystem, not a competitor: building a 21st century city requires bring the best tools and skills to bear on solving civic problems, and leveraging technology from Canadian companies brings benefits on both sides. We need to keep moving forward to turn Toronto into a genuinely smart city to better serve constituents and to save money at the same time, keeping us near or at the top of livable city rankings. He also promised that he will step down after a second term, if he gets it. 🙂

Breaking now for lunch, with afternoon sessions on open data and digital change agents.

By the way, I’m blogging using the WordPress Android app on a Nexus tablet today (aided by a Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard), which is great except it doesn’t have spell checking. I’ll review these posts later and fix typos.

I’m attending the Technicity conference today in Toronto, which focuses on the digital transformation efforts in our city. I’m interested in this both as a technologist, since much of my work is related to digital transformation, and as a citizen who lives in the downtown area and makes use of a lot of city services.

After brief introductions by Fawn Annan, President and CMO of IT World Canada (the event sponsor), Mike Williams, GM of Economic Development and Culture with City of Toronto, and Rob Meikle, CIO at City of Toronto, we had an opening keynote from Mark Fox, professor of Urban Systems Engineering at University of Toronto, on how to use open city data to fix civic problems.

Fox characterized the issues facing digital transformation as potholes and sinkholes: the former are a bit more cosmetic and can be easily paved over, while the latter indicate that some infrastructure change is required. Cities are, he pointed out, not rocket science: they’re much more complex than rocket science. As systems, cities are complicated as well as complex, with many different subsystems and components spanning people, information and technology. He showed a number of standard smart city architectures put forward by both vendors and governments, and emphasized that data is at the heart of everything.

He covered several points about data:

• Sparseness: the data that we collect is only a small subset of what we need, it’s often stored in silos and not easily accessed by other areas, and it’s frequently lost (or inaccessible) after a period of time. In other words, some of the sparseness is due to poor design, and some is due to poor data management hygiene.
• Premature aggregation, wherein raw data is aggregated spatially, temporally and categorically when you think you know what people want from the data, removing their ability to do their own analysis on the raw data.
• Interoperability and the ability to compare information between municipalities, even for something as simple as date fields and other attributes. Standards for these data sets need to be established and used by municipalities in order to allow meaningful data comparisons.
•  Completeness of open data, that is, what data that a government chooses to make available, and whether it is available as raw data or in aggregate. This needs to be driven by what problems that the consumers of the open data are trying to solve.
• Visualization, which is straightforward when you have a couple of data sets, but much more difficult when you are combining many data sets — his example was the City of Edmonton using 233 data sets to come up with crime and safety measures.
• Governments often feel a sense of entitlement about their data, such that they choose to hold back more than they should, whereas they should be in the business of empowering citizens to use this data to solve civic problems.

Smart cities can’t be managed in a strict sense, Fox believes, but rather it’s a matter of managing complexity and uncertainty. We need to understand the behaviours that we want the system (i.e., the smart city) to exhibit, and work towards achieving those. This is more than just sensing the environment, but also understanding limits and constraints, plus knowing when deviations are significant and who needs to know about the deviations. These systems need to be responsive and goal-oriented, flexibly responding to events based on desired outcomes rather than a predefined process (or, as I would say, unstructured rather than structured processes): this requires situational understanding, flexibility, shared knowledge and empowerment of the participants. Systems also need to be introspective, that is, compare their performance to goals and find new ways to achieve goals more effectively and predict outcomes. Finally, cities (and their systems) need to be held accountable for actions, which requires that activities need to be auditable to determine responsibility, and the underlying basis for decisions be known, so that a digital ombudsman can provide oversight.

Great talk, and very aligned with what I see in the private sector too: although the terminology is a bit different, the principles, technologies and challenges are the same.

Next, we heard from Hussam Ayyad, director of startup services at Ryerson University’s DMZ — a business incubator for tech startups — on Canadian FinTech startups. The DMZ has incubated more than 260 startups that have raised more than $206M in funding over their six years in existence, making them the #1 university business incubator in North America, and #3 in the world. They’re also ranked most supportive of FinTech startups, which makes sense considering their geographic proximity to Toronto’s financial district. Toronto is already a great place for startups, and this definitely provides a step up for the hot FinTech market by providing coaching, customer links, capital and community.

Unfortunately, I had to duck out partway through Ayyad’s presentation for a customer meeting, but plan to return for more of Technicity this afternoon.