Ten reasons to go on a Smart City Journey with TM Forum

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Step #1: Scoping your city’s journey with TM Forum over the next year. In the days and weeks following agreement, we will organize a journey together with phone calls and online development. It will be a journey you and your team want to go on and the Forum will document it and agree it with you in an iterative process. We will help you navigate the Forum’s assets, members and smart city partners, to accelerate the development of your smart city journey.

Step #2: Smart City Maturity & Benchmark Model (SCMBM) workshop, onsite. This model is an easy-to-use team and vision development tool for smart city managers, city-by-city. It uses best-practices from many smart city standards bodies and helps you rate how your city is doing and design where your city is heading. As the number of cities taking part grows, you will be able to analyze your strengths and weaknesses and benchmark and network with other cities globally. One or two TM Forum staff will travel to and facilitate a workshop in your city. We will host a dinner for the team the night before and the city will provide a meeting room for the workshop.

Step #3: Tailored advisory. The workshop will further inform the journey. Together we will co-design a monthly advisory webinar program to help deliver your strategy and deepen your team’s knowledge of any topic covered by the maturity model (from leadership and governance, to citizen focus, to usage of data, to cybersecurity and ICT). We do this by accessing Forum members, including other smart city practitioners; technology industry leaders; academics; industry analysts; and TM Forum experts.

Step #4: City as an Innovation Hub. Quite a few cities have a strong local digital industry that accelerates city-scale digital innovation, through meet-ups, hackathons, open-data projects and more. Some local governments are turning their city’s digital fabric into an open innovation hub for multi-agency digital collaboration, using IoT, Big Data and Cloud. Start-ups and companies in these cities are gaining a competitive edge, and local government is finding a new form of economic development as a provider of the digital smart city platform. We will accelerate this with you in the following ways:

• Open APIs & FIWARE partnership: We work with the world’s leading communications service providers to create Open APIs that connect digital ecosystems. These become industry standard. Various cities have used these APIs and now the world’s leading open source ‘smart city platform,’ FIWARE, is adopting them too. We’d like explore how this could work for you.
• The Forum is a place where the world’s leading communications service providers share best practices and know-how. We are extending this knowledge sharing to include cities, and can expose you and your team to a wide variety of best practices, from DevOps, to Customer Experience Management, Data Analytics, and much more.

Step #5: Catalyst champion. Cities on a journey will have chance to be a TM Forum rapid prototype proof-of- concept Catalyst champion, proposing a business and technical challenge for other TM Forum members to solve. Typically, 4-6 members join together for several months to solve the challenge, and showcase the solution at TM Forum Live! in Nice. In 2016 TM Forum, managed over 30 Catalyst projects with over 100+ member organizations involved. That’s a lot of brain power at work. More details are available here, and we will work with cities on a journey to help frame a problem that will attract participants.

Step #6: Market Research. TM Forum provides in-depth market research including surveys. Cities on a journey with the Forum will be given access to our Smart City research for a year and profiled in a detailed study of smart cities.

Step #7: Develop your International Profile. TM Forum’s emails go to 200,000+ people around the world, with reach into the millions through digital and partner channels. The CxOs of cities on a journey with the Forum will be profiled globally in TM Forum communications, as we develop a series about ‘urban digital leaders.’

Step #8: Free entry to TM Forum Live in Nice. Cities on a journey with the Forum will be given a free gold pass to TM Forum Live in Nice, where we are connecting the best thinkers in the world of ‘Digital Politics.’

Step#9: Year round networking TM Forum runs events around the world, and will welcome cities on journey to these events where it makes sense. We also attend the main Smart City industry events, and will host a dinner for cities on a journey attending these events:

1. Smart Cities Week, 27-29^th September 2016, Washington
2. Barcelona Smart Cities World Expo, 17-18^th November 2016, Barcelona
3. TM Forum Live!, 7-8^th December 2016, Singapore
4. Smart to Future Cities, 1^st April 2017, London
5. A couple of others to be announced.

We also actively make connections between Members. It’s in our DNA.

Step#10: Unexpected delights TM Forum is a collaboration environment for the world’s digital leaders, and now some of the most innovative cities on the planet too. We have a strong track record of bringing talented people together, and many of the best outcomes happen organically. The Forum will help a city on a journey navigate access to this amazing community. We don’t exactly know what will happen, what we know for sure is that new partnerships and initiatives develop at TM Forum all the time.

Contact us to learn more

And don’t just take our word for it…