A Symposium on Smart City KPIs, organised by the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) Joint Programme for Smart Cities (JPSC) at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2015 in Barcelona on 19 November, provided a global perspective of the state of the art in smart city technologies. By bringing together researchers, city government officials, and business people from all over the world working on smart city indicators, the symposium also offered an opportunity to share experience and best practices.
Due to uncertainty arising from the application of technological solutions in different urban contexts, participants in the symposium stressed the need to have systems of commonly agreed upon Key Performance indicators (KPIs), allowing for the comprehensive collection of data and its evaluation.
In a session dealing with evaluation frameworks for smart cities, researchers and practitioners presented the results of their work on the development of smart city indicator systems. Joachim Lonien from the German Institute for Standardisation (Deutsches Institut für Normung -DIN) spoke about existing ISO standards in the area of smart cities and outlined efforts being undertaken by projects financed under Horizon 2020 to perfect these systems.
Another session at the symposium dealt with the monitoring of Smart City Lighthouse Projects. These projects are large scale demonstrators, in which smart city technologies and other innovative solutions are rolled out and tested at neighbourhood scale. KPI-based monitoring and evaluation is an integral part of these projects. Antonio Garrido Marijuán, from the Austrian Institute of Technology stressed that the challenge here is to evaluate the energy, economic, environmental and social performance of each demonstrator in a transparent and consistent fashion, in order to identify technological and non-technological bottlenecks and take adequate corrective measures.
Research has shown that decision makers and planners are the main end user group of smart city indicator systems. In his presentation at the symposium Darren Capes, Transport Systems Manager at York City Council, said that smart city performance indicators allow city administrations to know if they are spending effectively and to measure their progress against wider targets. He stressed that for monitoring and evaluation processes to be successful, governance must be transparent and politically neutral and be able to arbitrate fairly between conflicting interests and demands. Bernd Vogl, Head of the Vienna Energy Planning Department, stressed that, when it comes to KPIs, less is more and that choosing the right KPIs relies upon a good understanding of what is important to a smart city.
The final session dealt with the usefulness of city benchmarking, and whether the differences between cities made this a pointless exercise. In this regard, Hans Christian Christiansen, a senior advisor to the City of Copenhagen, said that cities need inspiration, visions and goals, and that indicators can provide these.
For more information:http://www.eera-sc.eu/events/eera-jpsc-symposium-key-performance-indicators-smart-cities