| | 19 DECEMBER - JANUARYCXO INSIGHTSBy Marco Turchini, CEO, A2A [BIT: A2A]Smart cities are a trending topic and often a buzzword. Everybody has his own definition of the smart city concept. Depending on the context, almost everyone wants a slice of the cake and probably deserves one. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have the cake recipe yet.Most of the time, we make exchangeable use the word possibility vs. the word opportunity. To say it plain, the main difference that we can highlight is that while possibility goes along with the feasibility of action, opportunity stands beside the judgmental objectivity of a positive balance of benefits vs. costs.In the smart city domain, you'll find great possibilities, pushed by technology providers or enablers, but are such possibilities real opportunities? It is obviously a rapidly growing marketing, but what is the real value so far, and how willing to pay are beneficiaries?To go in-depth with this line of reasoning, let me introduce the concept of City User as the single person that for a variety of reasons decides or must use a city or a part of it to perceive a specific goal, like we use a phone to make a call (and in that case, we can be the phone users). A city user can be a citizen but also cannot: if I commute to a city for work, I'm not a citizen while I am a city user. And I am a city user when I deliberately decide to use the city or a city asset (physical or digital) to perceive a specific goal, e.g. when I park a car on the street or when I use a publicly available set of city information.If you frame this way, this helps to make clear that city users make choices and take decisions based on the value that every single decision brings them: in a word, the sum of the value they perceive could be seen as the real opportunity that the market shows today.We, as a company, aim to bring on the market Smart City services and, to pursue this goal, often go back defensively to show prospects trend and possibilities vs. to engage the opportunity line of reasoning: it's more in our comfort zone to show benefits brought by technology vs. elaborate more on the value generated for the city user. And we often lose. Is a city manager your city user you are pitching? What value can you bring to her purpose? How willing or able to pay is she? We, for instance, have experienced that local governments or majors suffer 3 key issues: mobility, security, and trust. We know that there are plenty of solutions for these problems or needs, but who is going to pay for them (because they cannot afford such solutions, generally)? Citizens? Don't. Even. Try. Our preferred approach to these situations is trying to balance positive business case solutions with harder to monetize ones: if you bring energy savings, then you could suggest investing part of the savings in bringing additional - but harder to monetize ­ value to your city users for instance on security topics, even working on the very same assets (e.g. monitoring building usage from HVAC to understand people presence).Do you think 5G will revolutionize the smart city landscape and enable your smart lighting solutions? Have you tried to do the math vs. what a really more basic LPWAN based solution could cost to your public lighting operator (aka your city user)? Where is the 5G value for her?Really excited about bringing additional revenues to your Municipal Parking Company's general manager (aka your client)? Have you ever asked a driver (aka your city user) her opinion about paying some additional money to reserve a parking slot?I could continue for hours, but you grasped the point: try to put your city user's shoes on and focus on what is valuable for him vs. what technology could bring down on earth. VOICE TO CITY USERSWe, as a company, aim to bring on the market Smart City services and, to pursue this goal, often go back defensively to show prospects trend and possibilities vs. to engage the opportunity line of reasoning
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