IBM Offers Cash-Strapped Mayors A Smarter City-In-A-Box | Fast Company
For the last two-and-a-half years, IBM has aggressively pursued its Smarter Planet strategy, producing more than 2,000 consulting engagements in cities around the world that want to improve their performance by tapping the data their citizens generate–including a public safety control center for the NYPD, water management for Dubuque, Iowa, and a weather prediction and emergency response system for Rio de Janeiro. Now the company will use those lessons to offer a smarter city-in-a-box to cash-strapped municipalities that want to reap at least some of the benefits of real-time urban analytics.
The Intelligent Operations Center, which IBM will announce today at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., is a streamlined suite of real-time dashboard, analysis, and data integration tools designed to mimic the more expensive civic control centers it has built in New York and Rio. Over the next 12 months, IBM intends to offer specific modules for public safety, water, and transportation that combine tools to make it easier to connect IBM’s analytical engines with embedded systems.