Recommendations to Cor
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BIG DATA TO SMART CITY: RECOMMENDATIONS TO COR Brazil International Laboratory 2017 Price School of Public Policy University of Southern California Photo: Claude Mazé Submitted to Centro de Operações do Rio (COR) on June 2, 2017 Authored by: Alexander Yee, Andrea Avila, Fazrin Rahman, Gabriel Armsted, Jennifer Roglà, Leigh Adamo, Martha De La Torre, Max Sherman, Nicholas Ryu, Radin Rahimzadeh, Rui Zhang, and Suhail Alrashidi. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank COR for providing us with their time and resources. Roger that. A special thanks to Mr. Pedro Seixas and Dr. Antonio Bento for coordinating our visits and faciliting the creation of this report. Muito obrigada(o)! EXEC SUMMARY EXECUTIVE SUMMARY COR has an opportunity to build upon its intial successes and establish itself as an innovative Since a landslide tragedy in 2010, the city of and indispensible agency for the city. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has been heavily using information and communication technology Background to bring the government closer to the citizens under the umbrella of its Smart City Plan. It COR brings together 30 of the municipality’s has enabled solutions that are helping the city departments along with private suppliers in to become more inclusive and to provide a a single monitoring room. Here they track better quality of life. real-time conditions in the city, and coordinate responses to emergencies and disruptions. The basis for the development of the Smart Other cities have similar projects – Madrid has City Plan for Rio de Janeiro was the expansion one control room for police, fire and ambulance of the local government’s telecommunications services – but none are as big or broadly network, which has intensified the presence operational as that of Rio. of the government throughout the city, along with a digital inclusion program, an important Information is shared real-time between indicator that tracks the population’s access to city staff from various departments – from new technologies particularly in disadvantaged transportation to sanitation, health to communities across the city. emergency services – as well as with the private contractors that own the transit lines, Among the smart services offered by the do road work, and collect trash. For example, municipal government are the monitoring staff from RioÁguas - the City entity tasked and operation of the city’s operations center, with preventing floods - monitor the level of the Centro de Operações or COR, which enhances rivers; the CET-Rio traffic agency keeps tabs integration between agencies and utilities, on vehicle flow via the video wall, changing supporting the local government’s decision- traffic lights if necessary and calling field making processes. agents to manage accidents as soon as they happen. Upstairs is a room for journalists, who can access much of the same information – effectively acting as COR’s megaphone, and helping crowdsource information back to COR’s systems (Frey, 2014). COR serves as the city’s nerve center, applying analytical models to more effectively anticipate and coordinate emergency responses. COR’s social media outlets also provide frequent updates on weather and traffic, as well as recommended alternative routes around A giant wall monitor is broken into a grid showing status the city on days of special events including graphs, meteorological reports and live video feeds from concerts, soccer matches and festivals. traffic and CCTV. Photograph: David Levene 4 SWOT ANALYSIS ‘SWOT’ Analysis of COR officially “illegal,” since residents often do not own the land they built their homes Strengths upon, and yet the communities are also openly tolerated, as they provided affordable The strength of COR is its ability to integrate housing options for the urban poor (Penglase, many departments involved in Rio’s daily 2009). This is imperative because 23-34% management; and to manage crisis and of the city’s population (around 1.5 million) emergency situations. COR’s ability to manage lives in vulnerable low-income communities, crisis and emergency situations is a globally most of which are located on slopes which recognized strength. COR also provides and become hazardous in intense rain (Catalytic exchanges information with the public through Communities, n.d.). the media and social networks. The public reaps great value from these services, and has Opportunities the opportunity to contribute to the improving these services by submitting crowdsourced An opportunity for COR to enhance its capacity information (Harrison et al., 2012). These to serve the people of Rio is to mobilize strengths allow COR to be a cutting edge universities partnerships to improve service organization with the potential to drive delivery. Cooperative university links could innovation. help develop a data science workforce that will help COR innovate its services in the future. Weaknesses These links strongly rely on both informal personal networks and formal organisational Current statistics from COR’s Facebook and structures (Turpin et al., 1996). The Twitter page illustrate a potential weakness in implementation of a cooperative university- terms of COR’s social media outreach. Rio de government link could increase COR’s working Janeiro has a population of almost 6.5 million capacity that will enhance service delivery and people in the city of Rio de Janeiro (IBGE, would be aligned with Rio’s long-term strategic 2010), while there are 290,566 Facebook plan to become a smart city model, that invests followers. Their page is still new, created in in innovation and efficiency for a sustainable, 2015, and has been accessed approximately inclusive and resilient urban administration. 4,000 times to date, revealing the need to continue expanding COR’s social media outreach. Equitable delivery and access to services in low income communities is a weakness that requires special attention due to the proliferation of informal housing developments in the City of Rio de Janeiro. These neighborhoods have long occupied an ambiguous grey zone in Rio de Janeiro, at once not own the land they built their homes upon, and yet also openly tolerated, as they were 5 SWOT ANALYSIS PEOPLE & PARTNERS COR now needs to develop a Post-Olympic mission that will equitably serve the citizens of Rio de Janeiro in COR’s day to day functions. According to the Stanford Innovation Review, a good mission statement is about the what, not the how (Starr, 2012). This would be an excellent opportunity for COR because the organization can reconsider its mission statement and rebrand itself as it enhances its social media outreach. Threats Threats that will impede the progress of COR are directly related to having a small staff, which could lead to systemic failures for COR. A small critical emergency response team could lead to productivity loss due to the intense amount of mental capcity such work demands. This could adversely impact the effectiveness of COR’s information communication technology systems in a time of crisis, disaster, and risk management. Additionally, Kahn (1990, 2010) describes engagement as the harnessing of people’s selves to their work, such that they fully invest their physical, cognitive, and emotional resources in their work roles. Ensuring employees are engaged and fully attentive to their tasks will be an ongoing challenge for the small direct COR team. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ COR’s ample strengths can be built upon when addressing the weaknesses, opportunities, and threats considered here. In particular, COR’s wide experience with partnerhsip building with other City agencies as well as private companies can be leveraged and expanded. The next section will consider who are COR’s current stakeholders, who are their potential partners, followed by our vision for this report. We will then consider three main areas for our COR recommendations: smart data capacity, indicators, and communication to stakeholders. 6 7 PEOPLE & PARTNERS PEOPLE AND PARTNERS COR’s general categories of partnerships are laid out in the above figure. When considering their current partnerships, consistent engagement, communication, and performance measurement of internal and external stakeholders will help maintain support, advocacy, and mutually beneficial partnerships. Yet COR has an opportunity to increase their number of external stakeholders by fostering meaningful partnerships and pushing forward collaborative efforts. Additionally, COR can work towards measuring the productivity of their internal partnerships, and evaluate the overall processes of COR to identify opportunities and develop best partnership practices. VISION FOR RECOMMENDATIONS To identify and strategically focus how city management in Rio de Janeiro, specifically Centro de Operações Rio (COR), can use big data to promote resilience and smarter city growth consistent with COR’s mission. 7 SMART DATA SMART DATA Most of the data out there is unstructured and SMART DATA & OPEN SOURCE it is only with artificial intelligence and ana- lytics that that data can be turned into mean- ingful data or smart data that can be used for Recommendations proactive policy-making, rather than reactive Require partners to collect more variables re- policy making. Multiple layers of intelligence lated to the same data points can be built into the big data that is collected to Ex. Populations in the same area who process, analyze, store, interpret and improve experience a shock differently because the data and effectively make the data point to they live at different points in elevation. nuanced patterns and information that is very Facilitate partnerships with universities to useful (Shumpeter, 2011). create guideline for data sharing Recommend partnerships with data science The exciting potential to make use of big data startups to help organize, store, visualize data is highlighted in its participatory possibility Create PENSA 2.0 within COR to facilitate that gives not only policymakers a voice, but data flows and also allows for citizens to contribute data that analysis. The team will continue to include: 1) highlights their urgent needs to their repre- Strategic planning 2) Data analysis 3) Research sentatives.