Smart City Lab
Data management for municipalities. On the morning of 12 May, the Smart City Lab project was launched at the Sthlm Smart City and Sthlm Live Tech fairs.
Data is the new raw material. Data is used at the individual, organisation and societal level, and comes with organisational and technical barriers that need to be managed. Smart City Lab is a project within IoT Sweden that will address the issue of how municipalities can have standardised and quality-assured data management.
Support function and meeting point
Smart City Lab is both a support function for Sweden’s municipalities and a meeting point for learning and experience. It is an arena for collaboration and standardisation of soft digital infrastructure. Smart City Lab wants to be able to offer a toolbox of concrete models and tools, full of examples and guidelines. Four different networks will be set up within the project: Suppliers, “The Journey” (how to move forward in the digital journey), MIMs (framework and standardisation at the international level), and Procurement.
– There is a gap between the directives and guidelines in place and the reality of the municipalities, says Therese Balksjö, project manager of the project at RISE.
Collecting the puzzle pieces
– There are a lot of good projects in Sweden, with a lot of wisdom that can be extracted and applied – these are the puzzle pieces that we will collect, says Claus Popp-Larsen, project manager of the project at RISE. We will also look at international lessons learned, and see what has been done abroad that we can learn from here in Sweden, Claus continues.
– If you have 5,000 inhabitants in a municipality, how can you even recruit staff with the right expertise? Do all of the 290 municipalities need to be in agreement – no, that’s not going to happen. We need to get the ball rolling and start collaborating, says Markus Flyborg, solutions architect at Sundsvall Municipality, the municipality that was named Digitalisation Municipality of the Year last week.
Markus Flyborg continues:
– We need to get out of the feasibility study rut – we do Proof of Concepts and pilots that end up on a shelf and never make it to scale-up. We need to start collaborating and finding models together, and Smart City Lab is a good place to start.
Smart City Lab receives funding through IoT Sweden, with RISE serving as project owner and the municipalities as the main target group.
