#getTogether I Digital Transformation in Practice I How to Make a City Smart

Welcome to this get together from Git Abstract. I'm Andrew Savickis, Chief Strategy Officer at Git Abstract. My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Reichental, the CEO of Human Future, a global business and technology education advisory and investment firm. Dr. Eichentel is the former Chief Information Officer for the city of Palo Alto, California and a technology leader whose 30 year career has spanned both the private and public sectors. In 2017, he was named one of the top 100 CIOs in the world. He is a popular writer and online host, producing several successful online courses with LinkedIn learning. He co authored the Apps Challenge Playbook, and he's a frequent speaker on a wide range of technology and business topics. He co hosts the popular podcast Drinking Wine, Talking Tech. His current book, Smart Cities for Dummies, is now available in most bookstores and online. I'm thrilled he's here with us today. Welcome, Jonathan.

Hi, Andrew. It's good to see you again.

Likewise. Likewise. So let's start with a simple question. I hope. What exactly is a smart city?

Yeah, that's the right question and a tough question to answer. There is no agreed upon definition. There is no agreed yet. And that's the case very often in an emerging space. You know, when something is starting and you've got lots of participants, you got lots of ideas. I think eventually we'll settle on a definition that everyone agrees on, but to quickly sort of define it, I gotta just give a little context. One thing your listeners need to know is our future belongs to cities. The majority of humans now live in cities, and over the next few decades, more and more will join. And by the end of the century, almost all humans will be in a city context. The question is, are our cities ready? Are they ready for that scale of population? We already see a lot of duress, for example, on water systems, on air energy, on transportation, on the environment, of course. And so, you know, they're struggling. There are few cities in the world that can say, hey, we're in good shape, you know, we're running everything perfectly, everything's working as it should. We have happy community. So really what I'm building up there is a picture of a world that is now largely urbanized and has significant challenges meeting the needs of their communities. And so my definition, and I'll give you a couple of variations here, the most basic one is a smart and sustainable city, is one that is responding to its needs using technology. Typically, technology plays a very big part in this, but also things like good governance, you know, good processes, a community that is engaged in building solutions, you know, is engaged in the conversation. So that's one way of thinking about it. There isn't a way to say it that applies to, let's say, Singapore and London and Palo Alto and Boston. Each city needs to come up with its own strategy to solve its own problems. But I like the Smart Cities Council definition, but they basically say smart city is one that uses technology to increase the quality of sustainability, livability and workability. And that's the one that sort of stuck with me. And you'll find variations of this. One thing I will say in conclusion is it's not one thing. It's not Iot. It's not the Internet of things. It's not a city that uses data, it's not a city that has broadband to every house. You'll hear those sometimes, but in the deep research I've done over almost 10 years now, it's much, much broader. Broader than that.

Great. All right, thank you. Thank you. You talked about there's differences between a Singapore and a Palo Alto and a Boston and a London. And I think right now we're all watching firsthand just how different cities can behave in their response to the coronavirus and the COVID 19 pandemic. What's your take? As someone who spends a lot of time looking at cities and talking about cities and thinking about cities, what's your take on just the wide variety of responses that we're seeing and outcomes, frankly, to the pandemic in cities ranging from Tokyo to New York to Paris to London to Singapore?

Yeah, it's quite remarkable, really, isn't it? Well, first of all, look, we were not prepared. One of the things that I encourage city leaders to really focus on is this notion of resilience, the ability to bounce back under all sorts of conditions. For example, a recession, hurricanes, earthquakes, even, you know, violent protests. Cities have to have plans and they have to invest and they have to have talent and know what to do when something happens. But we really were not thinking about and preparing for an epidemic, and now a pandemic of this scale. So it has caught our cities by surprise. I mean, you can say you thought about it and you said it could happen, but it's different when it actually happens. And it has happened here, really, in the worst case scenario. We're struggling with a significant problem here. I think what comes out as this pandemic unfolds is how much culture plays a role in how cities behave, how they respond. So you're going to see not only cultural differences between Countries, Right? That's an obvious one. There's a big difference between American culture and French and German and Australian culture. But you're going to see even differences in culture between cities in different regions. And so that means, you know, after all, what is culture, right? And it often forms organically and it, it reflects politics, religion, history, geography, and it's constantly changing. So I think what you're seeing on one level is how a culture confronts a catastrophe of this scale. And in there you see, for example, to what degree is economics the priority? You know, to what degree should we be super folks focused on health? Right now, the topic, as you and I are speaking, that the major topic is should children go back to school into the classroom? And again, you see very different approaches to this around the world, reflecting people's beliefs and cultures. I think it is disappointing that we didn't tackle this globally. You know, I really think that this would have been a good role for the United nations, perhaps, or a much stronger role for the World Health Organization. Perhaps there's another global organization that could have taken it on. And not only do we see a lack of international coordination, but in many countries, even a lack of national coordination. And that ought to be a priority. You know, it's that old sort of saying, if you're in a boat and you know there's a hole in one side of the boat, the folks on the other side where there's no hole are in just as much trouble. Right. You know, if the water's flowing in, we all have to be working on it together because then it's. It's useless to have the other side of the boat just bailing out the water. Look, we're early in this. We're early in this problem and we're figuring stuff out. I think we're probably going to talk about a few activities that cities are undertaking, but I don't think we should underestimate that. We see the application of societal values here. Some have not worked that well, as we know through the data and we're learning. In some countries they tried some experiments that, that they thought were consistent with how they would look at a problem. For example, in Sweden, the debate is still out whether their experiment to not do much, if you like to try to go with herd immunity. Did that work? And we'll find out. Right now the data doesn't look great. Or you look at New Zealand, where the entire country absolutely shut down and there was extremely good adherence and they appear to overcome. Have no instances of COVID right now.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you, I'm quite jealous of my colleagues in our home office in Switzerland. You know, I see pictures of them going to the beach and enjoying a good time in the summer. And I certainly wish we could be doing some of the same here in the States. So it's certainly true that we've never seen on a global scale a pandemic spread this fast, just ferociously, you know, all the way around the world. I mean, air travel and everything has obviously contributed to that. But it's also true that, you know, throughout history, pandemic or cities have borne the brunt of pandemics, be it, you know, the plague or cholera. And ultimately those pandemics have led to long term changes in sanitation and infrastructure. What kind of changes? And I know it's, as you point out, we're early on in this, but, you know, as someone who studies cities a lot, what do you kind of changes do you see kind of becoming permanent as we in a post pandemic world?

It is a question I get asked a lot and I wish I could look into the future to be able to give the best example possible. Like everyone else, I'm observing what's happening. I'm seeing what's happening in terms of good best practices that are helping and trying to make sense of sort of the patterns, you know, what kind of patterns are emerging. I do think it's still important. Here we are speaking in July 2020. You know, this pandemic really exploded in March, so we're not that long into it. We never heard of it before December of 2019. So I do think making conclusions about radical permanent changes is a bit premature for a lot of, you know, folks like myself, futurists and analysts who try to try to predict. I do see a few, few things happening though that are suggestive perhaps of where we're headed. Look, I think we all agree cleaner hotels and cleaner airplanes and cleaner stores is a good thing, regardless. And if you have been out recently to your local supermarket or if you've been to, if you've attempted to be on a flight or go to a hotel, you'll notice things are significantly cleaner. And that's just a good thing, regardless. I mean, what I've learned through this is we could have been doing this for a long time and the amount of colds and flus that we got in previous seasons would have been less. I didn't realize, for example, the degree to which shaking hands does contribute to really bad flu seasons. So if we were to turn the corner tomorrow, and this thing went away. I would hope that we would continue to have this super focus on washing hands, disinfecting things, cleaning areas that are populated by lots and lots of people. So we're seeing that. I do think we'll continue to see that kind of behavior continue. The other one. Well, there's two others that are again kind of obvious. I'll try to give another one that's maybe less obvious is delivery is here to stay and delivery is here in a very big way. Again, to make it personal for just one moment. I never bought any groceries online before this pandemic. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm one of the few, but I always went to the store. I always liked to go to the store in the evening and pick up a few things. And when we were sort of at. When we really didn't know anything about what was happening and we were on in this very restrictive shelter in place, I started ordering online. And I was like, this is great. This is awesome. So I like it. And I think a lot of people who hadn't done things like grocery shopping online are going to continue to do that. All the delivery businesses are exploding right now. Whether you're Instacart or your Amazon. Of course, if you have a good business that has great customer service and reliable delivery, this is going to be a good period and it's going to continue to be good. So I think that's important. By the way, that's a sort of general comment on changes. But what does that mean to cities? Well, it has big impact in my book. I was researching the supply chain and in particular, what's the relationship between the supply chain and building better cities? Well, deliveries are projected to go up in terms of volume significantly, as I've just said. By the way, when I wrote about this in the book, this was pre pandemic and it was already projected to grow. Delivery was ready. So what happens with deliveries? Well, you get trucks going down small streets, you get double parking. You need spaces for people to unload things. So our cities will have to evolve to accommodate for a massive new volume of different modalities of delivery. Everything from bicycles, trucks to even drones, both aerial based and ground based drones. The next one would be in medicine and the delivery of healthcare. This is becoming clear now that we are going to embrace telemedicine. Another area where I personally been reluctant. I don't know about you, but once I did it, you know, talked to my doctor either on email or through a little video chat on my smartphone, it was like this makes sense. And that's a good. I mean, that's a really good story because, you know, we, if you and I've done this, if you look at the way in which cities have to respond to their health care needs, we're never going to have enough doctors, we're never gonna have enough nurses. No matter if we were. If we were putting all these. As many people as we could through medical school and nursing school now at volume, we still wouldn't be able to keep up with the needs. So you have to scale healthcare in a completely different way. And I'm not just talking about the US Here. I'm talking about Southeast Asia and Africa and Eastern Europe and South America. All around the world, healthcare needs are increasing as populations age, as there are more solutions for more diseases. So we need to have scalable medicine. Telemedicine is a very good way to tackle that. The final point I'll make, and this is maybe the more of the novel one, is we had began this process to pedestrianize parts of our cities in many communities in. In Europe and in Mexico City and some other global cities. We were starting to restrict cars and other motorized vehicles and in its place make parks. So those grand boulevards which had trucks and all sorts of noisy vehicles traveling up and down, spewing all sorts of carbon into the atmosphere, suddenly it's silent and. And you put trees there, you put these urban forests and even little streams and stuff. And now you have a place where people can go. It's safer, it's cleaner, it's better for the environment, it reduces the temperature of cities, it creates more community. And we've seen sort of, we saw this momentum already, and now we're seeing cities do this because they want obviously people to be able to congregate without being densely together. So it's been, you know, an accelerant. An accelerant. So I think we're going to see redesign of popular sort of central areas of major cities all over the world. So that could be one. I'm pretty sure that's going to be one physical way in which we see a difference in the months and years ahead.

Well, you see a couple times you mentioned acceleration of trends that were already happening. You talked about delivery and some of the sort of d automobile efforts. And that notion of things that were happening already moving faster has come up a lot in the context of a term that we certainly hear around here a lot, which is digital transformation. So when I usually encounter the topic, it's about hearing from our customers in the context of their companies. So, for example, what they're saying is we were already looking at a shift to a more remote workforce and this has accelerated that. Right. But you have a different perspective on digital transformation because you really led that during your time as the CIO of Palo Alto. What was the biggest challenge that you faced in turning Palo Alto into really a leading digital city?

Yeah, it's a topic I talk about and write about a lot. Much like the definition of smart cities, the definition of digital transformation is also poorly understood. I'll give you my definition, so that'll help with answering the question. To me, digital transformation isn't just about putting your stuff online, you know, creating web pages, creating apps. It's about reinventing how you deliver your business. And to me, that's the way that business leaders need to think about this challenge. Not that digital transformation is some sort of cool trend that, you know, sure. You know, if we have a retail store, we should have a web based store. If we, you know, if our competitors have an app, we should have an app. That's not what this is about. And that's, you know, that would be a failure. I think what you need to do is realize that the world around you is changing at this accelerated rate that what you took for granted perhaps for decades or maybe a century if you're, you know, well established business, that's all now ripe for disruption. And, you know, digital transformation isn't,

you

know, I think this is what a lot of newspapers where, they made a mistake. They took the newspaper modality, the physical newspaper, and they just put that online. Right. They just try to replicate it. And you know, some areas, you know, with the big newspapers popularity sort of sustain them, but they have struggled, for example, with people paying. I mean, people are still resistant to pay for content on the web. And so my advice always is don't just take your existing model and put it on an app or put it on a smartphone or a digital assistant. Reinvent it. Reinvent it for 21st century marketplace, 21st century customers. Rethink how you deliver it, how you provide that service. And that to me is digital transformation. And that applies to cities. And it certainly applied to our thinking early on in the city of Palo Alto. You know, one of the characteristics of cities is, yeah, if it's not broken, don't fix it. I mean, just continue to do what you do even if the world around you is progressing. And I mean, this is most evident when you're in the private sector or you're using private sector services. Typically you can do some sort of activity online, you can submit a form, you can make a request, you can buy things. And then you go to a city and they say, call this number. Or they say, come into this building and fill out some forms. And you know, so there's this sort of disconnect. How can it be that the private sector is becoming increasingly digitalized and, you know, the public sector continues to rely on, you know, older 20th century processes? Part of the answer is money. Totally get that. People will push and say, jonathan, we just don't have the money. Sure. The economics are different, that's for sure. And there's also this. There's no sort of competitive basis to make the change. Right. While cities compete in terms of brand and prestige, they're not necessarily competing all the time. For the permitting system in your neighboring city is using a digital system and your permitting system is using a paper system. Therefore, we have to have a digital system. But that's not, you know, the driving force. People are beginning to expect it. And if they go to the other city and they see that, they're like, well, maybe we should also have that service. So what we did in Palo Alto was we started to inventorize all our processes. He said, how many interactions, how many different types of ways can you elicit service in the city for getting a permit, for requesting a trash collection, or to buy a, a ticket to the local theater, whatever it is that the city provided, or, you know, use the community swimming pool? And we looked all these things and we started to prioritize and say, what can we digitize to make the process smoother? Actually lower the cost by digitizing, increase the efficiency, lower the number of errors, because these are all things that digital transformation do. And let's go after those in a prioritized way. And the example I would give, I've mentioned it a few times. Just coincidentally, when I joined the city of Palo Alto, there was this thing, they would call it the Palo Alto process. And that was unfortunately a negative term. They were saying that it probably means that the government bureaucracy will be, will take a long time. And the way it manifested was, you know, quite clearly was through, if you needed to get, you know, a permit, right, some sort of permit for maybe electrical, new electrical devices in your home, like a new kitchen with new appliances, you know, if you wanted to build an extension to your home, all these things. And by the way, in cities there are a lot of permit requirements as anyone has ever tried to deal with them, has probably realized. And, and so on a typical Permit, you could submit the application online, then you'd have to go in, fill out some paperwork, come back a few days later and then wait. Sometimes it took a month, two, three months. And so what we said was, how can we make some of that more efficient? How can we digitize it? How can we transform the experience for our community? So we looked at some obvious opportunities and we were able to reduce some of the permits that took three months into one day or less. Some of them were instant, you know, because there was no requirement to be in person. We just have to have. We had to deploy the, you know, tendant supporting software and make it available on different devices. So really turning that around was a, you know, some innovation that my colleagues did really nicely. You know, my vision for the city was cloud first, mobile first, which basically means if we're going to build things and do things, we're going to do with the mindset of new technology and new ways of delivering service. I have more examples, but for now I'll just stop there.

No, those are great. Those are great. And something else that's come up, and you've sort of mentioned this already with this doing these changes, that it's not about just replicating what you already do in a digital way. In fact, what I heard time and again is that true digital transformation really is less about the technology and the tools and more about the people in the process. And, you know, it sounds like what you're saying earlier, there's some parallels there with cities where, you know, we think about cities, we think about the buildings in the infrastructure, but really the focus needs to be on the people and the residents and, you know, making things work for them. You know, that the other thing is when you recognize that it's not a technical challenge, then it's important to make sure what you're not doing is just handing it off to IT people to solve. You know, that was something you'd mentioned in the book, that it's not going to work if you put someone from IT in charge of your smart city strategy. Can you elaborate a bit about, you know, sort of how you came to that conclusion and why you advocate a different approach?

Thanks for that. Yeah. I love that you brought us to the topic of people. The first sentence in my book I believe in chapter one is this is a book about people. And it's interesting because when people pick up the book, they might think they're buying a book about technology where they can learn about AI and blockchain and solar energy and stuff. They're Going to learn about all that for sure. But there's a really deep and focused amount of content on what it means to us, to you, Andrew, to myself, to your listeners, your viewers. You know, if we're not starting there, then we're making a mistake. You really have to start with how does the work we do benefit our community? And by the way, if we were to kind of go back to that question about a definition of smart cities, you know, whatever it is that I shared, you could append it with. To improve the quality of life. To improve quality of life. And I keep going back to this point a lot. My book, you know, those people that at a distance look at smart cities, think maybe it's about a surveillance society or an intrusion on privacy, like the next person. I hate that. I want us to have protected freedoms and I want the solutions to be about improving quality of life, not making life, you know, more difficult. To your question about, you know, who should lead these efforts and particular, you shouldn't assign them to the IT leader. In many cities, as they've began to recognize their need to have a smart city, smart and sustainable city strategy, they immediately think about tech. How can we deploy more apps? Or, you know, how can we use data? They're good questions, they're important questions. And some of the solutions will involve data, some of the solutions will involve IoT and apps. But it needs a human approach and the technology is going to be supportive. So what happens is the risk of assigning it to your IT department or your IT lead is that people perceive it as a technology project and they're like, well, you know, I'll sit in meetings and I'll help where I can, but I'm perhaps not seeing that this is really about quality of life. This is about how can we transform how we deliver transportation or community services or even a library or something. Right? So my view is, and I've seen this firsthand, including myself as being the smart city leader for Palo Alto, is certainly

you.

This IT leader can be involved and could be a co lead perhaps, but you have to have really strong governance that has leadership from across the city. City manager should be involved, the mayor or your city administrator. You need to have representatives from the community involved and sort of through that large group of stakeholders, identify who are maybe the go tos, the overall sponsors. And it should reflect the broadness and diversity of the community, not the, not a narrow sort of technology centric perspective. Those cities, by the way, that take that approach, they sort of say, let's get a Non tech person, but a public servant who understands public policy and has experience in running cities. Let's have that person collaborate with the IT professionals, collaborate with the other department heads, city manager in the community. Those cities that do that are finding that they're getting more buy in and more success. So again, evaluate your circumstances. But that seems to be more of a winning strategy.

I'm really glad that you mentioned the term governance. And I know, I mean that's as distinct from government governance. What's the process for stakeholder involvement and what do you do there? And it seems to me that that applies well outside of the context of cities. And in fact some of the things you mentioned about people's frustrations with bureaucracy or things moving slowly. I'm reminded a lot of the climate you hear from inside companies when it comes to their own corporate IT department. For example, like why do things take so long? And this process. And I remember, maybe, gosh, it was more than a decade ago, but I remember, remember you implemented a formal IT governance model when we worked together. Can you tell me a little more? And I remember that being a very important project for the organization. Can you tell me a little more about the motivation for doing that and kind of what you learned from implementing that and what it really means to implement governance when it comes to something like corporate it?

Well, firstly, you have a great memory. No surprise. Thanks for that and for identifying it as an important part of what we were doing. So I've worked in the private sector as a CIO, I've worked in the public sector as a CIO, I've Worked in tech for almost 30 years. So I've seen many, many aspects of organizations, how they operate, how they lead, those that succeed, those that, you know, have, have challenges. And you know, it's always hard to sort of summarize because there, I think there's nuance in life, I really do. There's nuance in business. But if we have to make sort of some big generalizations, I think that organizations in general do a poor job of governance, of putting in place the people and processes to manage things so you get the best value from it. Let me give an example. I'm a big proponent and I suggest every organization should have a data strategy. And in order to implement that data strategy, to get value from data, so it drives your business, you win new customers, you build great products, you need to have data governance. And what do I mean by data governance? Data governance means a set of agreed approaches and practices and tools and people to make sure you Leverage it. In the absence of that, aren't we all just kind of making it up as we go and just trying to figure out what the best next thing to do is? Maybe in a startup where you have three or four people in Silicon Valley, I see this every day here. Governance is too much of a burden. Like, no, we need to move fast and we got to be mavericks. But if you're a multi million dollar business already and you're, you want to sustain your business, you want to grow it, you have to have that kind of structure. So that's what governance does. Now the other, there are many, many different types of governance within organizations. Corporate governance, of course, which runs the entire business. But then there's this one that you raised, Andrew, which is IT governance. Now, I think IT governance, again, it means the same thing. Can we ensure that we have the people, process and tools to ensure that we get value from the investment we make to run the business, to deliver great products, make a profit, serve our shareholders, serve our customers? Are those processes in place now? Embedded in that, if we go a little layer deeper, is how do you make sure you're doing the right things at the right time? Now, many organizations might do it on gut. They might say, we think that's the right way to go. Or I believe, based on what I've read or talked to, this is the right way to go. That's got to be part of the input, no doubt about it. But you do have to have, I believe, and the evidence shows those organizations that have IT governance are actually more successful organizations. In fact, the data shows organizations that have IT governance in place and mature make more money. This is data. I'm not making this stuff up. And so it means you're spending your money right, you're investing in the right things and you've done sort of the diligent research to bring that to the table. One last point about IT governance is there's always going to be competing things. And for example, at the city of Palo Alto, or any city, unlike the private sector, where you typically have, you know, one main focus, or you have a number of products that you know are focused on a certain area. You know, if you're, if you're in the cleaning, you know, the detergent business, you're making really good detergents and everybody in the business is focused on that. In a city you really have lots of different businesses, really do. It's actually remarkable. Library is very different from the police. It's very different from the fire service, you know, or street Cleaning or transportation. They're also different businesses. And so what happens is when you have a centralized it, which is a good thing for an organization, you now have to make decisions as an organization. Do you build that solution for the library first, to build that for the fire service first? How do you measure the relative priority and then make a decision between two things that is fair not only appears to be, but actually is fair. And everybody feels comfortable that we're doing the right thing for the entire organization. So this is an area that we could see a lot of improvement, not just in the public sector, which is, I think, ripe for massive growth in governance, overall IT governance, data governance in particular. But the private sector needs to embrace this space in a much more serious and prioritized manner than they are today.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's funny, you talk about the different businesses that businesses a city as. And also when you think about cities and government, you think about politics. And there's always politics at play in some way, shape or form. And I think one of the things that it sounds like you're advocating with some of these governance processes is to implement some kind of a structure to it. So it's not just about who calls in a political favor or who has allowed his voice, but having a more, you know, a more inclusive conversation about, you know, what the priorities are and what should happen. You know, when we think about the future of cities, we're also really talking about the future of work in many ways. There's a lot of data coming out now about, you know, people saying, well, now that I have, now that I've worked from home because of this pandemic, I don't want to go back or I don't want to go back full time or, you know, I now, you know, companies like Twitter saying it's indefinite. Right. In fact, we did a survey of professionals in the US and I think it was 50% of people who had, they never worked from home before, but now they're saying that they do want to do it. Maybe not all the time, but a good part of the time that has implications for commuting, for infrastructure, for public transportation, for commercial real estate, for the, the sort of ebb and flow and pulse of a city. How should cities think about responding to changes like this? What appears to be long term shift to more distributed and more remote workforces?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Earlier on in our conversation, you asked me about what could be some permanent changes. And whilst in my mind I was thinking about the working from home, I thought perhaps we would go deeper on that later, which we are now doing. That is a model now that again, to use your term from earlier is accelerating. It was happening anyway. But you know, what we've done in four or five months, we probably would have done over several years. Organizations have learned quickly that it where it works. I guess they're also learning where there's some challenges too. You know, it's like it's one of those cases where we, the actual experiment was real life. You know, we didn't have to do a pilot or sort of a mock up. We let's just send everybody home one day and see if it works. I'll tell you my quick story on this. I was in Spain in the first week of March of this year and of course the situation was changing hourly. And I was working with a particular organization in Madrid and I was talking to the CEO who I became good friends with, and I said, you know, you're probably going to have to send all your workers home to work from home. And his view even at that time was, no, it doesn't seem like it's that bad. The there was this feeling that it's just going to be a bad flu and it'll be over. And I asked, are you ready for it if you have to? He says, I can't even do it because everybody has desktop computers in the office. So. Well, we know what happened. I think I got on a plane leaving Madrid on March 12. That night the entire country of Spain closed down. And over the next few weeks, they had one of the worst crises of all. Now, thank goodness, there seems to be in a better place today. But what was interesting about that conversation and that period for us is Spain generally, culturally did not have any support for telecommuting or teleworking. And so this was culturally very disruptive. I mean, they, they just had no history. Whereas here in the US and perhaps in the uk, the idea of people working home maybe one day a week, or even quite a lot of the population of a company working at home was not that wild of an idea. Certainly what we hadn't explored or anticipated was that everybody would work from home who could work from home. So it does seem to me that if you can do your job well, and some of the data shows some people are able to be more productive at home, an organization will be hard pressed to say, come back to the office. So there's no question that you're going to see a huge migration of people to remote working. And that does have big consequences in the medium to long term has huge consequences on commercial real estate. That's an area to be concerned about. It has challenges around things. Well, we do have to get the childcare situation sorted out because people can't, you know, a working couple can't be full time at their jobs. And if the kids have to be home too, which probably will get sorted out, those are difficult to coexist. That has to be addressed. There's an awful lot of upsides, though, of course. You know, less traffic, less. Less impact to the environment, better quality of life. You know, I work from home. I've worked from home for almost two years now. And I like it. I like it. I mean, I do miss the social elements of the office. I think everyone who works from home says that. But the ability to get up in the morning and make my breakfast in the kitchen and walk over to my office when, you know, a few feet away is quite the luxury. I don't worry about commuting or anything. One last point on this. When this first broke out and we had the shelter in place, I was invited to do an interview on npr. And the question they asked was, what does this mean to our Internet infrastructure? Do we have enough bandwidth and connections for people to work from home? You know, if everyone's at home on their home connection, might the Internet just collapse or implode? I had to do a bit of homework on this. And. And at the time, certainly my conclusion was no, there actually is a massive amount of capacity that we don't actually use. Now, depending on your connection at home, you may or may not experience some degradation of service. But in many parts of the United States, we do have sufficient infrastructure. Really, the point is, what about those that don't? So you take a city like San Jose, one of the largest cities in the country, and they have a lot of the population who either don't have Internet or still have dial up. They are very slow. And then this becomes a question of inclusion, it becomes a question of equality. So if we're going to have more and more people work from home, we're going to have to have better Internet connection for everybody. And I guess that deserves one point, one additional point, which is not everybody can work from home. Right? I mean, there's a heck of a lot of work that the economy needs that people have to go to factories and farms and so that, you know, those will continue. And so we're gonna have to figure out sort of how this all becomes the norm in the months ahead. No doubt, lots and lots of people are going to continue to work from home when this is solved.

Yeah, it's a good point you raised about inclusion. And there's certainly a lot of folks making the case that the stress that this pandemic has placed on our cities and our workforce and has in many ways exacerbated existing inequities and structural challenges. You've also, you've called data, and in the context of data specifically made available through city infrastructure, but you've called it a weapon of mass democracy. And that certainly sounds to me like something that might help in addressing some of these structural challenges and inclusion issues. Can you say a little more about what you mean by calling data, you know, such a significant tool for democracy?

Yeah. You know, when I entered public Service now, about 10 years ago, I made a lot of observations quickly. I mean, part of the reasons I even did it was out of a high degree of curiosity. You know, I don't think I knew much about government or behind the scenes other than, you know, just being interested in politics and, you know, and hoping that the city provided good services. But I didn't really understand how it worked. And so getting involved and really having a leadership role within a city was great to learn. I mean, it was incredible learning experience. And so when I went to the city of Palo Alto, you know, the first few weeks, I'm sort of making observations, and it became clear to me after a few months, you know, working in a city is. Is about working in an environment of constraint. You know, it's always about not enough time, not enough people, not enough money, too many projects, too many priorities. You know, like. And you have to sort of navigate that. Now, some of that exists in the private sector. Fair enough. But it's on a different level often in a city, particularly because people are changing their mind and there's new priorities every few weeks. And I felt, you know, that's an interesting environment to operate in. How do you navigate and be successful in an atmosphere and environment of constraints? But I recognize that cities have one thing in abundance, that's data. They have so much data because data is created and stored as a consequence of city operations. And it's sitting there, this rich repository of incredible data on every aspect of life. You know, some cities have birth certificates and death certificates. You have, you know, you've court documents, and you have building information and permanent information. You think about the hundreds, and in big cities, thousands and thousands of different data sets. In fact, probably in Shanghai, they have millions of data sets, right? Or New York City. And, you know, the data is either created as a consequence of an activity or it's stored, collected as a consequence, and then it sits there, and then it sits there. And I found that even though the city of Palo Alto had an awful lot of data, it was not being tapped for the value it could ultimately have. Sometimes we use the term derivative value, like what can you do with permit data after a document is created? About a permit? Well, you now have another artifact that defines the community and helps a range of stakeholders understand the changes that are happening. It can inform suppliers about what kind of needs a community has. You can see impacts to telecommunications and road work. Suddenly it becomes actually quite valuable. So I went on a mission to really try to figure out how can we make data more useful, how can we leverage this data? And we had a whole suite of projects. I was, myself and my team were very aggressive on open government, trying to make data available to the people. We had things like hackathons and challenges where we gave data to interested parties to build solutions themselves. But the big, big picture outside of that, because those are all important, is. And before I even make that one statement, I just want to just mention one other part of this that ties it in with democracy, which is, you know, governments should fear people. People should not fear governments, right? When you, when you, when the paradigm shifts to people fearing governments, you have, you have, you have a problem, you're heading towards tyranny, dictatorship. Governments should always fear the people. And the people they fear most are those that are informed. And we should be informed. For a rich democracy, communities should understand the detail of issues, be able to act on them, use them in arguments, use them at city hall. So as that is the basis, I believed if we could make the data available in Palo Alto to as many people as possible, they would become more informed and more engaged. And now we have a more trusting, collaborative environment in which to build a better community. And I've been advocating for this all over the world, and as of others, lots of other people do, to really embrace this notion of open government. And in fact, I mean, at the national level. During my tenure in Palo Alto, President Barack Obama and others formed the Open Government Partnership, the ogp, through the lens of the United nations. And that embraces these notions that a more informed public is a better democracy. So that's the story behind data is the, is a weapon of mass democracy.

Well, it certainly seems like some of our traditional democratic institutions are under a bit of stress right now. So I think we, you know, could all use a little more, you know, sounds like More data and more tools for informing the citizenry. So, you know, you've mentioned that Smart cities is not just about technology. It's not just about blockchain or things like that. If someone wants to know more about what their city is doing and what they should be more informed about, where would you recommend that they go to get a handle on what, if any, strategy the city they live in has toward addressing some of these challenges and making the kind of digital transformation transformation that you see on the horizon?

Well, I was being reluctant about this, but I'm going to just do a blatant bit of marketing.

That's okay.

I do suggest that people pick up my book because I wrote it to answer that very question you asked. I wrote it for people to be able to help build better communities for themselves. And this is not really a theoretical book. I wrote Smart Cities for Dummies to be a practical guide like action. Here's how you do this. Here's who you can contact. You know, now, outside of the book, if you don't buy it, that's okay. If you want to learn more, you know, the first place, of course, is your municipal website. There's almost an, almost a 99.9% chance that your community has a website. And fortunately, Google does a nice job of that. Just type in your city, type in the official site of name of city, and typically you'll get that in the first or second result. That should give you a lot of information. You should be able to navigate that site to find out what the open government strategy is, perhaps as a smart city strategy. But it shouldn't stop there. I mean, that's a good way of just getting up to speed. What I do recommend, if you think about the layers of government, you know, if you wanted to reach a national leader, it's actually really hard. You know, you got to figure out how to navigate that. And even if you could get to the right person, you're probably going to be six months out, if ever, right. Get to now the regional or, you know, state. In the US we call the states or the counties. It's still kind of hard. You know, you still sort of. It seems like abstract, but here's the beautiful thing. City leadership is very accessible. People don't realize this. In most cities, you can meet with the mayor pretty quickly. The mayor wants to meet with you. That local government is the closest relationship between citizens and government. And, you know, you should be frustrated by stuff. You should be frustrated by a whole range of things. We are, all of us are Political equality issues, I mean, there's enough to be worked up about, but you have a few things you can do. You know, clearly peaceful protesting is one of them. But I also recommend that go and visit people who are decision makers. Visit with your elected officials, sit down with them one on one. You may be surprised how easy this is to do at any city. So even if it's to meet the mayor of Los Angeles or the mayor of New York, you can get an appointment at the spend some time and I think that's a great way to learn about the city, but also express your point of view. Now if you want to actually make change, find the people in the department that you're interested in. If you want to make, if you want to understand your police department more and figure out what technology they're using, perhaps what the strategy is and how you could help. Try to get involved there. Try to figure out who the police chief is or their technical lead in their department. Again, easier than you think. I really encourage people to do this. When they do it and they, and they talk to the person, they meet with them, they have a completely different feeling and experience than they anticipated. So there's that. Then finally going a little bit back to the website. Find out what has been is happening in the open government area. Find out if there is data that is being posted through sort of data portal. This is increasingly popular because that if you can download that data and you're good at data, you know, in a spreadsheet or through an analytics package, you can start to craft all sorts of scenarios that you could bring to the table, bring to elected officials and you could even build a solution. You know, sometimes you don't have to wait for the government to deliver something. If you have a great idea and you have access to the data, you could even build a solution and sell it. We saw a lot of that in Palo Alto. We see a lot of that in many communities. The final point I would just make on this is sometimes that data does exist, but it's not good data. And good data, sorry, I should say bad data is worthless, right? You could have a lot of bad data and that's worth nothing. You have to have good data. Small amount or lots of good data is great. When you do research the data and you look at the date, perhaps when it was posted, it's two years old, you need to push, push them to post their most current data. That's an important little nuance there that I would encourage.

Great, great. Well, thank you, Jonathan, and I really appreciate that your fundamental message here, even despite everything going on right now, there's an optimistic message here about the future of cities and the future of our communities. So thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on the new book.

Thank you so much, Andrew. I really enjoyed this. Great questions. Thank you. All right.

Thank you.