Pittsburgh’s smarter city challenge

October 25th, 2012
Filed under: General, IBM | Huibert @ 10:09 am

PittsburghThe Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program awarding $50 million worth of technology and services over 3 years to 100 cities around the globe. These grants are designed to address the wide range of financial and infrastructure challenges facing cities today. It is an opportunity for cities around the world to get free expert consulting. For more information on the IBM Challenge you can visit the IBM website

Last year, Pittsburgh, PA applied for such a grant to get ideas on how to solve their traffic congestion problems. After a thorough selection process, they were chosen to become one of 32 cities that would receive free consulting from IBM experts in 2012.

IBM built a team of six executives from around the world (India, Sweden, Mexico and the US) to work on the problem. I was chosen to be part of the team because of the work I had been doing on an internal white paper on traffic as well as my software experience as a senior certified executive IT architect, but each member brought a different skill set to the team. Most of us had never been to Pittsburgh before, and that was a conscious decision, as the program leadership wanted us to take a look at the situation with fresh eyes.

We spent the first ten days of our assignment performing over sixty interviews to a wide array of stakeholders. As expected, they all had their particular point of view on the challenges facing the city, even though several popular themes quickly emerged. During this period we didn’t have many opportunities to visit Pittsburgh, as most of our work was performed at the city Town Hall, located just a couple of blocks from our hotel. However, after we completed the interviews, we had the opportunity to tour the city and visit several boroughs, including East Liberty, Oakland, Shady Side, South Hills and South Side. This allowed us to better understand the complaints we had heard, as well as evaluate the proposals that had been made. By the way, if you have never been to Pittsburgh, you should. The city is really nice and deserves to rank higher as a tourist destination. Each borough has it’s own style and character. I am not surprised Pittsburgh was named the most livable city in the U.S., as it seems a great place to live, work and raise kids.

After completing our analysis, we spent the last days (and nights) of our stay working on our report. On our last day we presented a preview of our findings at a meeting hosted by Mayor Luke Ravenstahl at Carnegie Mellon University.

Producing a report in just three weeks, about a city we didn’t know was a real challenge. Despite all the hard work, and our experience, there are many topics we didn’t have the opportunity to dive deeply into. The city, the Allegheny Port Authority, the county and the state, to name just a few of the stakeholders, already have many experts who understand very well the issues at hand. The problem, as always with large organizations, is to get everyone to work together and to share information. I sincerely hope that our final report, to be published shortly, will help them reach that goal. Since everyone we met was so willing to help improve the city and work has already started on some of our recommendations, I am confident they are on the right track.

Update 1: The event was covered by the local press: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Trib LIVE

Comments are closed.