Sean O’Brien, SAP’s global lead for Urban Matters and public safety, visited Sydney recently, and Eleanor Reader spoke to him about the major challenges facing governments in the management of urban environments, and how SAP is providing the technology to help them innovate.
ISAP: Why did SAP launch the Urban Matters initiative?
Sean O’Brien: Before we launched Urban Matters, we looked at the challenges we saw when serving a lot of SAP cities in urban governments, which we have been doing since the 1990s. We saw the market was changing; SAP was changing. Urban innovation is the key enabler to solve a lot of the issues around sustainability, security, safety and being green, so we launched SAP Urban Matters in May last year. It aims to do two things – improve the lives of people that live in urban environments and improve the economies that enable growth and communities to thrive in those urban environments.
ISAP: What are the major challenges governments are facing today?
SO: Cities are constantly competing globally for skills, resources, technology and investment. A major challenge we see cities face is how can they be the best city, or how they can address the fundamental issues to make cities holistically the most liveable, the best run or the most competitive. How to innovate is always a major challenge.
There are eight dimensions cities are benchmarked on, [including] economy, social and cultural capital, infrastructure, sustainability, resilience, global attractiveness, is it safe, green and clean, and welcoming. There’s not a simple solution; cities are very complex systems. What technology does is enable cities to look across all the things that they are doing and make sure that the people, the processes, the information, the strategy and execution, and the performance are all coordinated.
ISAP: How much commonality do you see in governments around the world, and what differences are there in the level of technological maturity?
SO: The level of maturity in terms of technology is very different, the level of understanding about the potential technology is very different and the financial ability to execute around technology is very different. If you’re watching Europe and North America, austerity is stifling innovation. So you have this convergence of very unusual factors where you have got emerging countries and economies like China and India that have money, are growing very quickly and have an understanding of the power of technology – but their level of technology adoption has not been the same as Western Europe and North America. But on the same note, they don’t have the barriers that North America and Western Europe do around austerity and financial and debt.
The great thing is we are no longer relying on say Western Europe and North America to do all the technology innovation. Culturally, what we have found in the public sector with SAP is Australia is very much a pioneer and is much less risk-averse than other parts of the world.
Australia is a very first adopter kind of culture and often a risk taker – not crazy risk, but we are seeing that ability to innovate. Now when I travel, I am actually using examples from Australia, from India, from China, from Latin America, from Africa, from the Middle East, because disruptive, game-changing innovation comes from all parts of the world.
ISAP: What are the potential applications for HANA in the government sector?
SO: The potential is phenomenal. We see three trends in government – mobile first, then cloud and real-time. When we looked at HANA, the question was ‘where is it that we have the greatest need for real-time?’. What we found is it is in public safety and security agencies like the police, fire departments, medical services, border agencies and the intelligence community. In public safety and security, there is a convergence – the volume of data is creating huge challenges for people. The ability to analyse huge volumes of data is a key challenge and the ability to deploy that in a way that somebody who receives that information can make a decision quickly on that is a challenge. So this convergence of volume, velocity and access has created a huge demand for real-time in public security.
ISAP: Are governments wary about making significant new technology investments?
SO: We have seen a shift where governments used to do very big transformational projects. That’s still relevant, but more and more they are wanting to do smaller technology projects – quick time to buy, quick time to benefit, has an immediate impact, must be seen and visible outside, and there is a lot stronger political connection to those projects. That’s the thing that’s very different. This is why mobile, real-time and cloud is very relevant because these kind of things can be delivered very quickly.
ISAP: In Australia, where do you see potential in terms of taking government and urban management to the next level?
SO: Cloud, mobile and real-time. I think mobile first is really a game changing technology for how government delivers, consumes and executes services. I have heard lots of stories about how mobile has been deployed in Australia and I think that’s going to continue. More and more cloud technology will be deployed in innovative ways. We have seen some examples already in Australia where cloud is working.
This ability to have real-time analysis of information, predictive analysis and to deploy that in devices and to enable citizens to consume some of that information is very key and I think open government, our open data is driving that really in a big way.
ISAP: How can we stimulate innovation in urban management, when it comes to technology investment?
SO: The role of the CIO has been changing in many cities or they are being introduced in many cities or urban governments as chief innovation officers. I think the key is each technology is seen as an innovation driver and critical for city innovation in government. Is the right funding from federal and state government being put into innovation around technology and are the people that are trying to solve the problems in government aware of the power of technology to solve those problems? Are technology companies and solution companies engaging at the right level with government and are they willing to co-innovate with government to bring in disruptive technology?
What doesn’t work is if you think to be a ‘smart’ city, you just choose one vendor and you have a switch and the next day you are smart – it doesn’t work that way. It’s a constant challenge and it requires many, many people in the ecosystem, many components, many parts of the community, many parts of the government to come together with technology companies to make small incremental innovations that then can have a disruptive impact.
Case study: A vision of green
Known as the Oxford of the East, the historical city of Pune in India has a rich legacy in education and is the country’s sixth largest and fastest-growing city. The Pune Municipal Corporation has been administrating the city and serving citizens since 1950 and has taken the initiative of implementing e-Governance.
With the city facing problems such as air and water pollution, the first priority of the Pune Municipal Corporation is to keep the city clean and green, says Tejaunsh Nyati, CEO, Nyati Infosys.
With fast growing urbanisation and the development of manufacturing plants in many areas, many trees were cut and no record was kept. They decided that to rectify the problem they would need to plant more trees and ensure the trees already there were well-maintained and not being damaged or cut down.
To be able to manage their green spaces correctly, they needed to count how many trees there were, so they decided to create a tree census and engaged SAP as the implementation partner on the project.
“They came to us and said we want to do a census of all the trees in the city and we want to take a picture of the tree, what type of tree it is, its condition, the geographic location and we want to have a real-time view so we could see all the trees,” says Sean O’Brien, global lead, Urban Matters and public safety, SAP.
Because Pune’s gardeners and officials didn’t own laptops or desktops, smartphones and other mobile devices were deployed and a mobile solution was created to complete the tree census.
The Mobile Tree Census app was developed on the SAP Mobile platform, which captured the height, width, latitude and longitude of the trees along with logging their scientific names in real-time. All the data was then superimposed on Pune’s geographic information system map to get the exact detail of the city’s green cover.
According to O’Brien, the project was completed in four months and the solution has now been rolled out in other cities.
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Autumn 2013.
