Design

Goals of this stage

At the end of this stage, you should have a plan for implementation. To do this, you will need to:

• Understand the elements of smart place and identify areas for investment
• Establish your connectivity needs
• Identify the digital infrastructure needed to manage your data
• Research the solutions deployed or tested in other places
• Engage the market to uncover new potential solutions
• Select potential solutions to match your problems and opportunities
• Undertake an assessment of costs and benefits
• Set out a plan for asset management
• Determine your project management approach and governance structures for delivery and beyond
• Set out a benefits realisation plan, so you can evaluate your project after delivery.

Continuing engagement with customers and stakeholders

Engaging customers and stakeholders during the Design stage will generate a support base before implementation.

You can involve the community to:

• help identify potential solutions and validate support for new approaches
• find out the types of data and insights that they want and need so this can be factored into your solution design and data visualisation approaches
• share your policies and commitments to managing smart solutions and data in ethical and responsible ways
• uncover any concerns with new technologies and data management so that these can be addressed

• scope any digital literacy programs to support your community to participate in your smart place.

Elements of a smart place

When designing your solutions, you need to take into account all parts of the value chain. In order to be successful, you need to support the safe and secure relaying of data and insights.

It is equally important to have:

• The right connectivity
• The right digital infrastructure and tools to support the movement of data and insights
• Interoperable devices
• Strong cyber security
• The right capability and skilled people to operate and manage the smart systems
• The right policies, processes, guidelines and structures in place to support operations. We call these "foundations".

Connecting your place

Fast, reliable and comprehensive connectivity is the backbone for smart places, regardless of whether you are deploying an individual sensor or a city-wide suite of solutions.

Demand for high speed, reliable digital connectivity is increasing, and it is considered by many households and businesses as an essential service.

However, there is inconsistent access to digital connectivity across NSW and gaps in the affordability, quality and reliability of connectivity.

These constraints and variations across geographic, demographic and environmental conditions of smart places mean there is no universal way to provide digital connectivity. You should:

• Determine the digital connectivity already in place (fibre, mobile, Wi-Fi, IoT networks) to support the deployment of smart solutions
• Consider working with other place managers or consider taking a suburb or regional approach to establish shared digital connectivity assets.
• Make provision in your designs for additional pit and pipe capacity to allow for future connectivity needs to be met.

Summary of connectivity solutions

Devices and enabling infrastructure

Sensors and actuators

Sensors, sometimes known as detectors, gather data from the surrounding environment. They are designed to detect and record slight changes in their environment, so that this data can be captured. When sensors are connected, they can capture and relay relevant data in real-time or for post-processing and analytics.

Actuators work in the opposite to sensors: sensors sense, actuators act. Actuators trigger an action or response from a connected piece of equipment.

Smart poles (multi-function poles) and smart furniture

Smart poles (also known as multi-function poles) are connected with fibre and power and can house devices and technology to improve connectivity and collect data in an integrated and modular way.

If planned well, smart poles can reduce street clutter and eliminate the need for costly retrofitting every time a new device or solution is deployed.

In Australia, multi-function poles have been deployed in some local council areas including the City of Sydney, Geelong and the City of Newcastle.

In the City of Sydney, the multi-function poles were deployed in the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens and the Domain to provide visitors with free internet connection through its Wi-Fi capability with the integration of Optus small cells. Integrating the small cells into the smart poles helped to reduce the visual impact the cells would have otherwise had on the street landscape.

If you are considering rolling out smart poles, know they will be an attractive option for mobile network operators looking to deploy small cells are part of their 5G networks.

Smart furniture is the collective term for urban furnishings in public and open spaces that can be equipped with devices in the same way as smart poles. This includes benches, bus shelters and bins. Connecting this street furniture with power and fibre will allow you to fit them with smart devices, delivering an improved amenity outcome.

Platforms and systems for managing data

During the Design phase, you will need to select a platform or platforms for managing data from smart devices. When doing this, you should:

• Consider adopting a framework approach whereby several best-of-breed solutions are brought together, rather than procuring or developing a single end-to-end data sharing solution.
• Ensure data sharing solutions work optimally together and complement the NSW Government's existing capabilities through the Data Analytics Centre and the NSW Spatial Digital Twin.
• Take an agile approach to the data sharing solutions framework so you can flexibly meet new needs and overcome new challenges when/if they arise.

Data storage

Broadly speaking, there are two main environments to consider when deciding how to store data collected from smart devices:

• On-premise solutions require a license to be purchased to use them. Because the software itself is licensed and the entire instance of software resides on-site, there is generally greater protection than with a cloud-based solution. However, the costs associated with managing and maintaining the solution can run exponentially higher than a cloud-based solution.  On-premise setups require in-house server hardware, software licenses, integration capabilities and employees for support and management.
• Cloud-based solutions are completely hosted by a third-party provider. This allows for a subscription-based service that can be scaled up or down depending on overall data storage needs, with no capital outlay. The NSW Government Cloud Policy is 'public cloud first', meaning NSW Government agencies must make use of public cloud services as the default.

Achieving interoperability

If you adopt a consistent data and systems architecture across all your different solutions and with other organisations, it makes it much easier to consolidate and share data and move between solution providers and systems. This is called interoperability.

Using standards

Standards can play a strong role in the interoperability of smart places by providing a framework to scale solutions more safely, securely, and efficiently. They can help to provide the 'how' of implementation and scale when place-owners might have already determined the 'why' - realising the benefits, and relevant risks, of digital adoption to smart places.

If you take a standards approach, you will be:

• Better equipped to do pilots and staged rollouts of technology solutions and scale quickly when you find a solution that works.
• Able to keep pace as technology changes, because you won't be "locked in" to a single solution or provider.
• Able to consolidate your data and make it available to others.

Types of standards and their benefits

Data visualisation

Data needs to be delivered in a meaningful way to support decision making. Data visualisation is about providing meaningful and actionable insights derived from the raw data through visual representation.

There are various visualisation tools that can be used to communicate smart place data to stakeholders and decision-makers. The type of visualisation tool will vary depending on the type of data being analysed and decisions you are trying to make.

Before designing dashboards and charts, you will need to think about the end-user of the data and what they need from it. Consider designing a prototype and testing it with users to ensure the visualisations are delivering the greatest value.

Visualising data using digital twins

Identifying potential solutions

You are now ready to identify technologies available to help address your problem statements or realise the outcomes for your place.

Researching lessons learned

Smart solutions are being deployed across Australia and the world.

It is important that you don't start from scratch, or invest money in pilots, when a solution has been established and discovered.

Invest time in finding out about technical solutions that are in the market already or are being tested that may help address the problem statements or achieve the outcomes you have identified for your place.

You can find out about what is happening in other places, by exploring the resources below.

We are also building a library of case studies on the Smart Places website for you to explore.

Resources for lessons learned

Understanding the market

Finding the solutions that are right for you can be a daunting task, particularly as technology changes at a rapid pace. To help identify emerging technologies or new ideas, you should engage with the market.

This involves briefing market participants with your problem statements or outcomes sought for your place (identified during the Discover phase), and inviting them to submit proposals for technology solutions that may be appropriate. Market engagement can also help you find new artificial intelligence solutions and fresh approaches to data management and data visualisation.

Involving the market early can help you to:

• Identify and validate potential solutions
• Understand practical challenges of deployment
• Find opportunities for partnerships to co-develop solutions.

Market engagement can range from the simple exchange of information to a more substantial discussion in a workshop environment, depending on the size and complexity of your project.

Methods and considerations for market engagement

Piloting new ideas

Piloting is a great way for you to test a new solution without committing to the full rollout of the technology.

Piloting usually takes place on a small scale or in an experimental setting, allowing any weaknesses or shortcomings of a new solution to be picked up early before a more comprehensive and expensive rollout of the technology takes place.

A pilot is a great way to establish and quantify benefits of a new approach and generate buy-in from internal and external stakeholders.

Regulatory sandboxes

Collaboration with regulators can yield a 'regulatory sandbox' for your pilot.

A regulatory sandbox is a variation of an exemption from normal legal requirements, with a focus on safety and learning lessons to inform potential regulatory change. Sandboxes are generally only allowed for trials or pilots with limited scope and are subject to the approval of risk management plans or safety management systems.

If the regulatory framework does not currently provide for this kind of sandboxing, then significant time and uncertainty would need to be factored in to account for the necessary regulatory change.

Planning to manage your assets

NSW State Government agencies and councils must have asset management plans, which provide for the 'coordination of activities to realise the value of assets managing the risks and opportunities of assets to achieve balance across cost, risk, and performance'.

The assets in a smart place include:

• physical infrastructure
• digital connectivity
• sensors and actuators
• software
• data.

Each asset has its own lifecycle, replacement schedule and maintenance needs – beginning with planning, design, and asset creation, through ongoing maintenance and eventually disposal.

To realise the benefits of smart places into the future, you will have to ensure regular and ongoing management and maintenance is performed on all of these assets.

Understanding the maintenance needs of your new assets will allow you to allocate appropriate funding. This will lead to proactive maintenance, maximising asset lives so the benefits of smart places continue to be achieved.

The Smart Places Customer Charter  Principle 6: Delivering benefits that last illustrates the significance of managing assets for the customer experience.

Asset management considerations

Resources for asset management

Determining the project or program management approach

There are several formally recognised frameworks for project and program. Examples include Prince 2, agile, etc. You will need to determine the framework that best fits the scale, complexity and risk profile of the initiative.

Determining governance arrangements

As part of developing your project delivery plan, you need to set out the governance arrangements for your project or program.

Your planned governance structures may change, depending on the procurement approaches and partnership models you adopt to deliver your project.

Whilst governance is a familiar practise for city building projects, smart places programs often require innovative models due to the mixture of people and organisations involved and the innovative nature of many of the solutions.

It is useful to examine smart places cases studies to identify how different approaches have been applied.

Establishing costs and benefits

You can now identify and quantify more detailed benefits of the desired outcomes identified in the Discovery phase. From researching and engaging the market, you should also have some cost estimates for the solutions you are planning to invest in.

When setting out cost estimates, be sure to identify any additional costs in establishing your project or program, including resourcing requirements and education and training to help people use technology or to complement the technology itself.

By weighing the solution benefits against the costs, you will give decision-makers an indication of whether the initiative is worth investing in. This is called a Cost Benefit Analysis; a systematic approach to calculating and comparing the benefits and costs of a course of action in a given situation.

Establishing a benefits realisation plan

Before you start delivering your smart place solutions, you should establish an evaluation framework and benefits realisation plan. This should outline the benefits you aim to deliver and how you will measure the impact of your project or program.

You may need to gather baseline data to help you track and quantify progress.

Building capability and further learning

Discover more about the Smart Places Playbook