Philadelphia is in the process of ramping up its smart applications thanks to a grant from the Smart Cities Council and plans to bring in a consultant to help it pave the way for a detailed roadmap for smart projects.

Philadelphia CIO Charles Brennan said officials weren’t aware of all the technology projects currently underway when they were preparing to apply for the Smart Cities Readiness Challenge Grant.

In the application process, however,  they learned about a project in the Streets Department to place speed sensors on roads that adjust traffic signals to slow down speeders.   They also learned how the Water Department feeds data from meters directly onto a network, and about work being done to place gunshot detection technology into security cameras allowing them to pivot toward the sound of a gunshot.

“All of these things were stovepiped,” Brennan told GCN. “Nobody outside the agency knew about them. When we called around [to departments] we realized, ‘Hey, guess what, we’re actually doing more than we thought.’”

Opening up these projects will be the one of the goals of the roadmap the city plans to create with help from the consultant. The consulting work is not part of the grant, and a solicitation for it will go out at the end of March or beginning or April, he said.

“I think we need an overall plan about how we’re going to approach this and how we’re going to consolidate all of the data so that it makes sense,” said.

Projects like these can’t be siloed, he said, because the biggest benefit coming from sensor-based technologies is the data they generate. “If they’re stovepiped, then the data is not being shared,” he said.

See more on GCN.