Data-Driven Smart Cities: A Closer Look at Organizational, Technical and Data Complexities

This management paper looks at the challenges faced by city governments as they build their capability to leverage data to achieve the promise of a smarter city. While producing analytics and visualizations have captured much attention, this paper argues that addressing data quality and data management practices in the early stages of the data life cycle are very important to achieving data-driven smart cities. To demonstrate this point, this paper discusses a case from New York State (NYS), demonstrating the challenges cities face when data quality and data management are not addressed at the onset of data collection and initial storage. Finally, this paper sets forth recommendations for city leaders to assess their environment and unpack complexities so that they can build data capability to enable data-driven decision making.