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04/26/2007The Digital City Realized: Q&A with James Farstad
James Farstad, President of rClient, will moderate that 6th Service-Provider Executives and Local-Government CIOs Roundtable at the Digital Cities Convention in Chicago, May 22–23, 2007. Over the past year, the Roundtable has fostered structured dialogue between local authorities and service-provider executives to determine the best ways to establish balance in public-private partnerships and ensure long-term sustainability. In Chicago, Jim takes the conversation a step farther: With a framework for the business model, how can we achieve greater clarity on the process of creating partnerships to realize the full potential of the digital city?
 Q: For the past couple of sessions, it’s been all about balance between the public sector and the private sector to ensure a networks’ sustainability.
A: That is correct. The Roundtable has been an outstanding forum to create a conversation about the goals, roles and processes that need to be incorporated into the design and development of sustainable local-government networks. We’ve been focused on creating clarity about the balance needed between aiding local authorities in achieving their goals while supporting the realistic expectations of the service providers to not only be able to deliver on those promises but to be able to do it over the long term. We’ve been able to create a framework that provides a set of questions and a set of strategies about creating that balanced approach.
Q: Now that the Roundtable series has reached a milestone of sorts, where do we go now?
A: It’s important to explore the next stage of development of these networks, which is beyond the core public-private partnership between the local government and service provider and into the larger community, and how additional stakeholders can become partners in the process. So now our focus is on the strategies and tactics associated with developing these, which will only strengthen the viability and true community benefits.
Q: As the vision expands outward, how do you cement these new partnerships together?
A: It’s got to be a win-win situation with value to all parties, and there has to be agreement about the mutual goals that will be realized. You need clarity about a shared vision that makes these networks more than a simple Internet access tool. The second key point is that people need to be clear about their role and expectations about what’s placed on them in the partnerships, and what their expectations are of others. It’s about clear goals, and shared vision.
Q: What are some of the stages you go through to develop partnerships effectively?
A: The first is to create awareness that there’s an opportunity, desire, and a value to them. And that can be done with a very public, or mass-media, approach—through newspaper articles, radio interviews, community meetings, and through local government and the service provider casting the net as widely as possible.
After awareness, you begin to promote the vision. To make that a shared vision, work sessions are required to gain feedback. There’s as much a need for listening as talking. As you move onward, those are best facilitated on a partner-by-partner basis. Once you have those frameworks in place, there’s a group to bring them together to provide the context for how they all contribute to a sum that is greater than the parts.
Q: What do you think it is about wireless that lends itself to a community-wide effort?
A: Wireless is potentially pervasive, and it is clearly mobile, so it allows you to not only create a network of end points, but to add the concept of place and how those end points relate to their current place within the community. Whether it’s location-based advertising, the context of place in neighborhood portals, real-time information associated with transportation systems—it all creates tremendous benefits for public safety and real-time interactions between command-and-control systems, and the eyes and ears at an incident. Wireless is all of those things, and it’s an unusual technology for those reasons. It’s also extremely cost-effective to deploy, and that’s a happy intersection between price performance and the capacity to be molded to suit the needs of a variety of stakeholders. It’s very malleable.
Q: But how do you do it technically? How do we deal with the fact that somebody went off and bought another network, dore more than one network—cellular, Wi-Fi—is operating in a single community?
A: At the Roundtable, we’ll use our dual brainstorm methodology with the CIOs, to clarify the problems, and service providers, to cover the nuances of technical interconnections to make the partnerships work as seamlessly as possible.
Q: Can you give a preview to the attendees in Chicago?
A: We’ll look with greater intensity at the specific kinds of applications that we can implement to create value for the individual users of those applications. We’ll also look at the concept of federation and how these networks can provide access to applications that can be used to streamline the interactions among a variety of stakeholders—government-to-government, government-to-business, government-to-customer, and so on—so that we realize the true potential of the digital city.
We’re two thirds of the way through. We’ve got a framework for the business model and greater clarity for the process of developing key partnerships. Now how do we support the digital interactions that are going to bring that benefit to the end users?
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