Cape Town partners with IBM in a prestigious project to help optimise service delivery
“We are launching an exciting project here today that will take place over the next three weeks” announces Mayor De Lille. “However, we hope that the outcome produced at the end of that time will ultimately have long-term effects for the city.”
The City of Cape Town is this year’s beneficiary of an IBM Smart Cities grant. This grant is awarded to a city selected for a project that is run by IBM and its staff at no cost to the City.
In essence, the City gest to choose a business problem that we would like addressed and we get a high-level, world-class team to work on it for just under a month. This is an incredible bargain for the City, especially as we are not obligated in any way to do business with IBM after the completion of this project.
We have spoken for years of taking our government to the next level. For the next three weeks, we will be fortunate to have a great collection of minds who will be assisting us in doing just that.
We have selected as our problem statement the following: How can the City of Cape Town effectively use and manage its social assets to optimise service delivery?
The City of Cape Town deploys a wide range of municipal infrastructural assets to generate income and deliver services to the 3,7 million people who live here.
These infrastructural assets, associated with engineering and utility services, have a technical logic that informs their distribution and the allocation of organisational responsibilities internally. Their direct economic impact has led to them being managed and invested in more aggressively.
But there is also a very large asset base which is central to the City’s ability to render social services. The distribution and location of these assets has, in many cases, been informed by events rather than being the product of careful planning (including the fact that they are largely the amalgamation of the social assets of our precursor municipalities).
In addition to this, the needs of our communities frequently change, with knock-on effects for whether our social assets are actually catering for these needs.
This reality has been compounded by the fact that the city has seen a large in-flow of people who have come in search of a better life, as confirmed by the data of Census 2011.
These factors, and others, have led to us trying to fully comprehend the City’s strategic needs according to our Integrated Development Plan (IDP), Economic Growth and Social Development Strategies and our constitutional mandate to provide access to basic services for residents.
Using the City’s five pillars (the Opportunity City; the Safe City; the Caring City; the Inclusive City; and the Well-run City) as a framing device, the IBM project will work towards the following outcomes:
•   Establishing definitions and typologies of social assets in the City of Cape Town (sometimes called facilities, but not limited to buildings or other structures, and also including public spaces and venues);
•   Developing a menu of services being delivered from these facilities;
•   Developing demand models to inform future investment in social assets;
•   Developing an integrated approach for establishing and managing these assets in order to deliver planned integrated services/programmes to deal with priority issues from the IDP;
•   Governance and appropriate organisation arrangements;
•   Gap analysis to inform investment and optimisation plans;
•   Determining mechanisms to measure benefits.
We have been working behind the scenes with IBM and their project managers to prepare them for their work with the City. The IBM team has already been exposed to our strategies, legislation and core policies and received briefings and information from the Director of Policy and Strategy, Craig Kesson; the Director of Information Systems and Technology, Andre Stelzner; and the City Manager, Achmat Ebrahim.
Now the team will do the hard part: meet with our officials and politicians, review our assets, and put together a product that we can use in to guide our budgets and management strategies in the years to come.
I want to welcome IBM to Cape Town and personally convey my thanks to them. We look forward to working with you over the coming weeks and trust that you will help us take this City to the next level of government.”
Extract from Weekly Newsletter from EXECUTIVE MAYOR, ALDERMAN PATRICIA DE LILLE
