Smart Cities and Digital Twins Overview

All right. Thank you, Carolyn. I appreciate the introduction and welcome to everyone who's joined the call today. I just wanted to do a quick introduction. My name is Joe Philbrook. I'm a Deloitte partner based in Vancouver, BC. Prior to that, I was based in Toronto. So I do have a little bit of experience from both sides of the country and it's a pleasure to be with you today. I'll be your moderator for today's session. But it's my pleasure to introduce our two main guest speakers. First, Marco Espinheira, who is the former head of Future of Qasqai Portugal. And we look forward to hearing from Marco to understand what the Future of Qasqai role meant to him and some of the great work that they did at Qasqai in Portugal. We're also joined by my Deloitte colleague. João Barroca from Portugal, and he is our global public sector digital modernization leader. So we're closely with many cities and municipalities in Europe as well as internationally, and he'll be sharing with us today some of the impacts that leveraging data in your municipalities and creating digital twins may have on your ability to work and shape the future. We'll start off with short presentations by both Marco and Jean, and then we'll enter into a bit of a fireside chat type conversation where I have some questions prepared, but we'll also open the floor to you if you have any questions as well before we close the webinar. So with that said, I'll turn it over to firstly Marco to tell us the story of Qashqai and your role. Over to you. Thanks, Joe. Hi, everyone. Let me just share my presentation here. So, hello, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm going to try and speak for less than 10 minutes. That was my commitment to Joe, so that we can have much more time to interact and to discuss and to for a dialogue. So whenever we talk about cities and about data and technology in cities, I always start to asking everyone to visualize, close your eyes and visualize what is the city of the future. And for most of us, this is the picture that pops up. So we're used by popular culture, by movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report and all of these things in the future. These cities are like this, right? And interestingly enough, and I always try and talk this because we are building the cities of the future and we are dealing with the technology. But if you think about that from Star Trek and Galactica 1999, everything that the futurists predict, it's actually coming true. So we have the self-driving cars, we have the... the communication devices of Star Trek. We are very close to teleportation even with quantum technology. But the city itself really did not come true. The city itself is going opposite of that, completely different, much more in sync with ourselves as humans and with nature. And so... Think about this when we are building the cities of the future based on technology, based on data. We definitely need to think about communities. And I show you these images because this sounds kind of very semantic and very romantic, but this is actually happening. This is actually designed for a city that is being built in China. With that in mind, let me present you Cascais. Cascais is very close to Lisbon, 20 kilometers away from Lisbon. It's around 216,000 people. Interesting enough, as a very interesting characteristic, that 20% of those people are right now expats. And we have a lot of nationalities here, 123. But 30% of our territory, our... 100 and almost 100 square kilometers of territory is a natural and reserved natural park. and we have 32 kilometers of coastline. And so a lot of this positioning of Qashqaij is what I showed you, very sustainable, very close to nature, very focused on community. And when we came up with the strategy for the city, it was a strategy based on what we want the city to be. Again, no technology involved whatsoever. And so we wanted to contribute, the executive of this city hall wanted to contribute to create this city, to add to the legacy and making this city the best place to live. And what do we think of when we think of the best place to live? Where would each and every one of us? If we had all the money in the world, no strings attached, if we can do whatever we wanted, where would we live? It's very simple, actually. We would think of five needs that we have and that we think of when we want to choose a place to live. A place that has very good education, a place that has a very good health system. A place that has wonderful quality of space and environment, green and quality of air. Where we have, of course, cultural offer because we need other people, we need to have fun, we need to socialize. And of course, we need to feel safe. This will vary depending on where we are, our history and our needs. I might place more importance on education, someone else might place more importance on safety. but this is actually what we search for. And so this is where we set out to create value, never forgetting that we wanted really was to make a community, to make a place where people could enjoy and could actually live with their family. And so in this way, we came into managing the City Hall around 16 years ago. And so we went directly into this notion of smart cities, not based on technology, not driven by technology, not even enabling some technological trends, but going directly to where we think a city should be, that is the co-creation with the citizens. And this sense of community, this sense of being able to, with the citizens, create a city, that is only possible with technology. but that's the end. And so basically that's what we did, what we set out to do. We wanted to create a city where we have this capability of managing the citizens, we call it CRM but with the C standing for citizens, so citizen relationship management, but we could only do that because We had already all the groundwork laid out. So the city was already very much virtualized. And we were already seeing a lot of trends for citizens already in remote channels, not really digital, but very, very little pressure on the face-to-face because it's happening all over the world. And what we did do... was to create this relationship management where we twisted the condition of citizen a little bit. And so think for a moment of a street that separates your municipality from the one next to it. I don't know about Canada, probably in Canada this doesn't happen. but in the great Lisbon we have 17 municipalities. And so there is really a street that separates one municipality from the other. And what happens is that what then differentiates the person that lives on the left side of the street from the person that lives on the right side of the street. And what we came up to do is exactly this. We were able to Being able to communicate, understand the citizens and create value for the condition of resident. This is what being a citizen for us is all about. In Cascais you are able to have free transportation system, you are able to have a health insurance, you are able to have free parking hours throughout the day depending on your condition. You can be a citizen, you can be a resident, you can be a student, you can be a worker, and we deal with that differently and we promote this relationship very closely together. and we use this relationship to hear and to say and to make ourselves heard as well. And so with this in mind and with this platform, it was very fairly easy to move forward. So we started with a single contact solution. There's only one number in Cascais, a free number where anyone can call to solve whatever problem. It doesn't matter if it's a cultural problem, a problem with the school of the kids, a trash residue problem or a mobility problem. This is one number only. And of course, then the data start pouring in and we started having more data. We started understanding better the citizens and we started adding to the services. So that was being done in this operational control center. This was a partnership with Deloitte where we started having all of this data that we wanted to work and turn into service to the citizens. When we could automated service to the citizens, when we could predicted service to the citizens. And when we were not able to do any of those things, just responded effectively and create a service level agreement that didn't exist before. And so we were able to change the paradigm and start communicating. Instead of communicating everything to everyone, started really being specific and solving and let everyone know what we were doing. in a very specific profile with very specific personas. And so then we moved on to the mobility system that is multi-modal integrated mobility service. We were able to use data also from outside sources. We were able to use data to send data to outside sources like Waze, for instance, so that people could use the data that we're having, for instance, regarding works on their preferred channels. And of course, with the residues, the waste management, we were also able to integrate this, being able to understand the needs very on top of the need so that we could respond easily. COVID hit, it was very easy for us to deploy information systems and cleaning systems, not everywhere like it happened to a lot of cities in Portugal, but we were able to create integrated with the hospitals and with the firemen and we understood where were the heat map, where were the points where infected people were coming up. in bigger numbers and we directed the cleaning services to those locations, especially to those bus routes and train routes. This was done in three days because we were able, the digital is able to allow us to build on top of this very easily and very fast. And so we were using the beach cam that surfers used to see the surf. We were using that to count people and to tell people how were the beaches capacity going on. And so, I mean, there's several examples. I went through them very fast. We can come back to them afterwards. But this was pretty much what I wanted to share with you very quickly. Just to finish and to come back to Joe's question about the head of future. We basically... We had the mayor that works like chairman, and then he delegated the executive powers on the deputy mayor that works like the CEO. And then he had four... big municipal directors or city managers if one for the territory where all the you know the the the traffic the urban planning all of these things are and then the people that has three main areas education social and health and then the the present which is the day-to-day of the city law hr law, all of the finance, everything. And then we had the future that it was everything else, around 43% of the city hall that had from communication to IT, to strategic planning, to smart cities, cultures, tourism, sports, all the big investments and so forth. So that was it. I hope I went exceeded three minutes. Perfect, Marco. Perfect. Perfect. That's excellent. Excellent. I think introduction to the topic today. And I think as a side effect of your presentation, I think you're also advocating for tourism in Cascade. I'm sure there's lots of people on this call who now want to want to make a visit. But truly fascinating. And we'll come back to you with some questions a little bit later on during the during the webinar. particularly fascinating on how the city created a role focused on the future not the not the present but how to evolve and and create solutions and capabilities to contribute to the future citizens of the of the city so we'll uh we need to have a role for the present as well okay we do yes yes yes um so then let's um what i'd like to do next uh jean if i can if i can you Turn over to you. You work with a lot of cities, both in Europe and internationally. You work very closely with Qasqai. What are you seeing as a trend? What are you seeing other municipalities and cities do? How are they leveraging data, technology to achieve some of the outcomes that Marco talked about? Yeah. Thanks a lot Joe and thanks a lot for inviting us. It's always a pleasure to join Marco in these conversations about Cascais because of the journey we've done together but also on how passionate Marco is about the topic and how knowledgeable he also is about all the things that Cascais has been doing around these smart city engagements. So when it comes to more of a global perspective, I think it would be good to start with a short presentation. I would drill down a bit on one of the aspects that we see more and more cities trying to target, which is exactly the topic of digital twins. I'll take the risk of sharing my presentation. I hope it works. Rosa, because I slightly changed the slides since I sent it to you, Joe, because this is, let's call it, oh, it didn't work. Is it working? We can see it. Yeah, it's there. Okay. I was going to say that because Marco was a few minutes late. It gave me the opportunity to actually create the slide on in real time. So I went to a night cafe. It didn't work. You froze up there for a second, but you're back. You're back now. Yeah, I was, I was just sharing that I went on, on, um, I went on Night Cafe, which is basically a generative AI algorithm for images. And I asked them, I inserted a description of what to me the city of the future is. And those images you just saw were the images that resulted from the algorithm, which is extremely interesting. So the things I said was, look at the city, think about autonomous vehicles, some of the parking spaces being taken as green spaces for people to actually enjoy. and tell me what a city of the future will look like. And this was the result of the work, which is extremely interesting, as you can see. So a lot of green spaces, cities that are more livable, that's exactly what cities are trying to have. If I move the slide, okay. So you can see that there are still vehicles. Some of them are autonomous. Probably some of them will be flying, as Marco was sharing. But the overall is that... The city of the future needs to accommodate people that live with quality of life, that have a good sustainable balance between nature and conviviality and also a sustainable balance between economic activity and all the creativity boosts that the cities bring to overall world development. And within all of these, and there are many trends that we're looking at when it comes to cities worldwide, and some of them are connected to green areas such as green planning of public spaces or even the 15-minute city. There are topics that are mostly connected to digital technologies such as the usage of AI. and digital twins, and I'll be talking about digital twins today. And then there are social topics such as mass participation of people using digital technologies, or even, I would say, equality and inclusion being one of the topics that a lot of cities are addressing. So when it comes to data and cities, I would tend to think that the most updated paradigm of a smart city or a city has to do with digital twins. And digital twins are... digital copies of physical systems, in the cases of cities, that create capacity to monitor real-time world cities or even to enable what-if scenarios analysis that really enable us to do two things. On the one hand, near real-time operational support, but then also scenario-based analysis of what can come and what can happen and better prepare for impredicted things. It does enable these aids. key topics. So predictive analysis, scenario simulation, operation optimization, but then simulation for the investment and justification of future improvements, KPIs, integration of let's say combination of reality and virtuality, and then intellectual interventions and accurate mapping. So if we are to focus on what kind of Z-digital twins exist these days in cities, we're mostly talking about four paradigms. The first one is connected to models of objects on real time. And this is mostly connected to, for instance, people willing to control a specific machine, a specific device that is critical for a certain operation. Then we've got still on real-time operations, the operations of the ecosystem. And this is, for instance, what we've got in place in Qashqai, which is a digital twin that enables us to have a real-time visualization of what's happening in the city. and have a real-time data integration that allows us to have optimized operations and really tackle the root cause analysis of a problem and send the right team to fix it. And then we've got with offline data two paradigms as well, product design, so the optimization of the design of the specific products, or then the scenario-based planning which is normally applicable to cities mostly in complex ecosystems such as mobility planning or even urban planning. So for instance, There are some cities we've been working with, which are planning a variety of perspectives, ranging from the location of houses, location of schools, and some public services as well. So the optimized location of public services, but also dynamic allocation of ambulances to prevent that in case of a disaster, there is a specific time of response. So all of these scenarios. are being addressed by cities through the aggregation of data with AI capabilities and analytics capabilities. Another perspective is then a variety of scenarios that range these two main paradigms, operations and planning. When we're talking about operations, we can be talking about optimization of journeys or customized experiences where I can really deliver a tailored service for a person because I have an integration of all the interactions person has with me and therefore i can really know the preferences the historical analysis and i can really tailor to specific characteristics the kind of service that makes more sense but then we've got the integrated city management that if we want combines both the operation in the planning scenarios so integration the integrated city management from our perspective is what really raises operational awareness and situational awareness where i can either tackle my operational perspectives or activate scenario-based planning. So for instance, in situations of not only, let's say, not only strategy for policies, but also on scenario-based planning for operational purposes, I can activate this perspective on more from a planning perspective of the management of the city. There are a few components that are critical for a digital twin, and I'd like to share a bit of this as well. I'd like to start, of course, by data sources and streams. Whenever we talk about a digital twin, we need to have a digitized service or a digitized device, right? Because otherwise, it's very hard to put the digital twin together. Then on top of it, on top of the raw data that we're generating, we need to have the capacity to... ingest the data and process the data, which is normally done through the cloud infrastructure with a core digital twin infrastructure that allows all the integration services. On top of these infrastructures, we then put together the applications, the visualizations, and the most important aspect of a digital twin is that it enables decision and actions. This is normally not a technology challenge, this is much more of a governance challenge. And the governance challenges, I believe, range all the layers that I just presented. Because sometimes it is very hard to get on hold of the data. So data governance is still an issue. Data sharing mechanisms is still an issue. And even if you want, even starting from the procurement processes, just the fact that we are procuring services that are, or products that are compliant with certain standards that then enable to have this data integration, sometimes in some geographies, it might be challenging. It is a governance issue when it comes to then have GDPR compliance and privacy regulations and even ethical regulations that will regulate what kind of applications we can be designing and how do we respect the liberties of people. And it again becomes a governance issue on how can I bring the visual services and the visualizations and the insights I'm generating to real decision making and to an impact in society as well. So a few of the why a smart city needs a use cases, a few of the use cases we have seen a lot better use of resources and therefore to more better monitor and optimize how the city is operating, improved resilience and this is mostly when we talk about extreme risks such as climate change mitigation or even addressing extreme events, increased competitiveness because we strongly believe that data ecosystems are part of what the city competitiveness is about these days. So whatever data we've got in the ecosystem will enrich the capacity of our startups, organizations, our academia, but even our public sector to generate better services. And lastly, sustainability, so that we've got a better grasp of what needs to be the good decision making in terms of the different angles of sustainability. And the last one, which I've addressed on the previous slide as well, better decision making. provided that we've got the right governance processes to act on the data. And then the last slide about what capabilities exist and what the Digital Twin is about. I really love this Digital Twin capabilities periodic table that comes out of the Digital Twin Consortium. And it has this six aggregation of layers from data services, integration, management, intelligence, and then EOI. UX and trustworthiness. And I would say that these capabilities end up being the critical ones. Can you hear me? Yeah, I think you froze up there for a moment, John, but you're back. Okay. I think there's something probably wrong with my computer because we're surviving. We're here. We've lost your screen share, but we can still hear you and see you. So I was just sharing about those capabilities is that those capabilities are critical for them to understand the variety of perspectives that Digital Twin can create in certain geographies or in a specific city. We've seen cities that were more interested in the metaverse, cities that were more interested in simulation capabilities, cities that were more interested on optimization capabilities. But the crucial part to take into consideration is that by the end of the day, I would say it's not only the visualization that creates the digital twin, it starts on the data ingestion, the interoperability, the right data governance, and then the digital twin will happen. And that I believe is one of the critical aspects we have seen across cities across the globe. That was part of the learnings we got from Qashqai while implementing these solutions. of the relevance of the right or proper governance and the proper capacity to act on the data, which is becoming more and more critical these days when we talk about the relevance of data in urban ecosystems. I'll stop here so that we can still have some time for questions. That's great, John. Thank you for your presentation. And I think one of the things that I've heard now from from each of you or one of the things that in your presentations you mentioned was the importance of having that foundation right like getting in place what I might refer to as some of the building blocks that enable you then to build digital services, digital twins, these types of use cases that benefit citizens. So maybe, you know, Marco, I turn to you first with my first question about, you know, what enabled you to have the mandate or call it the permission to... start to invest and build these foundational capabilities. What was the civic driver? Was it sustainability and climate? You had some use cases around that in your presentation. Were there other drivers as well that led the city to go down this path? Let me just address the question of Peter that he put on the message on board. It has to do about the... Give me just a second. It has to do about the percentage used in the different channels of the remote service because it has a little bit to do with what Jean was showing as well. Because, and your question as well about the foundation, of course we needed to make sure that people have the capability of having all of these different channels and so you cannot build one specific channel you can tell people that go to the to the store telling them so you just lost one hour next time you can just call or next time you can just send an email or next time you can even do it on the web or on the app and and that will drive a lot of people towards the digital channels. And of course the center itself also recognizes this because the information goes into the center via the telephone or email, which is basically the same thing. It's a human interaction and so we have someone there then digitalizing all of these services. But then if it goes through the web or through the app, it already goes in a very structured way. People already choose, this is what I want, my problem, and this is my question and so forth. And so we can already immediately direct that to a specific team. And then it can also go automatically through sensors, through a parking sensor, for instance, that says that a spot is occupied or not occupied. And we keep processing that information. And that's super important. when it comes to allowing people to get to know only one number and then realize that they can do a lot of things remotely. And then from there on to a website or to an app or even being automated some things, it's very, very easy. So going back to your question, Joe, this initial... drive to be digital, it's connected to our vision of the city. And so we want, we firmly believe in building a community that is able to dialogue and to build itself. And for that, I mean, we have one of the best participatory budgets on the planet, according to the World Bank. And that's not by chance. We really believe in that. But it's impossible to manage and to have this kind of coordination with 250,000 citizens at the same time. And so we, as cities grew bigger from when we were living in small villages, and as cities grew bigger, we always created problems that we were able to solve. And right now the problem is huge metropolises. So we're just too many in the city. But right now, we also have the tools to be able to solve that problem, which is technology. And so that was the main drive. We need technology to make our vision come true. Otherwise, it will not happen. Right, right. No, I think that's extremely interesting. Kind of leads me to my next question. And, John, this one is for you. I mean, you talked about having, actually, you both mentioned about having a view of the citizen, right? So understanding and all the different ways that the citizen interacts. with the city, right? Kind of like a customer relationship management or Marco, as you call it, a citizen relationship management view, right? Which allows you to deliver individualized services to citizens. How do you, how did you achieve the balance or Jean, I guess for you, like, how do you, how do you advise around the balance of having all this information about citizens on one hand versus maybe some requirements around? privacy and you talked about governance a lot in your presentation as well so how do you balance between those two that that's actually a very interesting question we just launched a global report calling called the digital digital citizen survey and um we actually asked that question to people uh and we did that in multiple countries across the globe so um And we also did it across different levels of government. Curiously enough, people, when it comes to city-level relationships, they tend to prioritize personal contact. And the reason for that is quite clear as well. It also has to do with the nature of services being provided by cities, right? Because some of them are social services, and they really require some physical presence. But we actually have asked people what kind of data would be comfortable to share and under which conditions. And truth is that people are willing to share their data provided that they get better services and that they can understand and control what kind of data is being shared. One of the paradigms we've got for government relationship is also a once-only principle. It gets very frustrating when... The different public entities request the same information that has as a source actually a public entity in itself, right? So we see a lot of that. And that's something that we see more and more public services trying to address, either through interoperability or through better regulation and governance as well. Of course, there are principles that need to be taken into consideration, and those are the ethical boundaries of what should and should not be done, but also the privacy regulation. But there are also ways of better involving and creating general awareness about what can be the art of the possible and what's happening, but at the same time, actually what data sets are being used. And I believe more and more these movements start to appear, even though, let's say, the level of maturity of some public services is not addressing that at this stage, which is even to have some data. or even some privacy dashboards, but I would know which kind of data different government entities are using from myself. And actually, I would be able to acknowledge that I'm willing to share the data or revoke the access if I want to, to give you a very specific example. Let me just add to this, Joe, we feel that a lot. So this is not the right crowd to ask, but if you in any room ask. Who are you going to trust more, central government, corporations, or city halls? I can assure you that, you know, all the hands go to the city halls, because it's a very different kind of government. We're very, very close to people. And so that tends to create relationships. People are being heard. Their problems are being solved. And if they're not, you know, the mayor goes down the street and someone points at him and says, you didn't do this or that on my street. And that doesn't happen anywhere else. And the other thing is that what John just said, I think, and I've always felt that that's the huge difference from the data protection laws that we have to the data protection laws that we should have. It's because it's not who has my data, it's what is the entity that has my data. doing with the data that matters. And we have no idea what people are doing with the data. And we're just being asked to allow someone to have the data or not. That's not a question. That's not even important. I would like to know every time that someone, whoever it is, uses my data. Because getting the data is not difficult at all. Any relationship, commercial relation will ask you, will you give me the data so that I can provide the service? Duh. Yeah, that's very interesting how it shifts from preventing people from having your data to having a voice or a say in how your data is being used. And if you feel there's value or services being provided to you through the use of your data, as Jean, as you said, you're okay with that at that point. Let me just give you... One more piece of information. So for some of these decisions, again, going back to community, I can have, I'm 20 kilometers away from Lisbon. I can have a completely different policy on data and privacy and everything that Lisbon has. And so what we encourage here for... for instance, on CCTVs on the street. So we just set out to come up with a project for CCTVs, but we created a citizen panel where we, you know, hear them. So do you think that the CCTV should recognize faces or not? Should we keep the images for 24 hours or for a week? Should we read license plates or not? And why? And so we bring experts on these matters. We have them tell the benefits and the disadvantages of each of the questions. And then we can hear them. And so, again, this is something that it's not inevitable. We are building this and we should build this. Yeah. Yeah, Marco, one of the things that struck me when you were speaking was you called it stage three, I think, was the co-creation stage, right? Where you're working closely with citizens to design the services and the digital capabilities that they want, right? Maybe share a little bit more about that experience, right? So it sounds to me like you had a very high level of participation from citizens. a willingness to participate, a desire to maybe even contribute in some way to building some of these digital services. What was that relationship like between City Hall and the citizens, so to speak? You're on mute. You're on mute, Marco. Joe, I'm sorry. I need to understand the question a little bit better. Yeah, yeah. So... So... Your stage three of your maturity was co-creation, right? Co-creation. Yeah, right. And so my question is about how was your how did you what was that relationship between City Hall and the citizens like? What kind of input did you get from citizens that you were able to leverage? That was not a stage. So that was basically where we started. our smart city vision. So those three stages were historically, and so we jumped right onto the third one. Again, before we had this digital platform, we were already creating the participatory budget. We were already doing in the schools. We are already showing what is a budget plan for the city. We are already showing the kids how we create and how do we manage public spending. We are already talking to the parents and having them come, giving us the opportunity to listen to them on specific decisions. And so in every... aspect of what we do we try to keep this channel open we try to understand what people would do differently and how is it would be possible for for for them to do better or to think that we could do something else and so um it's i think that the only the only answer that i can give you is that You know, we had the elections one year ago and we, you know, reinforced the voting in the executive that is in front of the... of the city hall. And so, unfortunately, we don't have a P&L like all the other institutions. And so we have one KPI that is every five years we have general elections. And that's when we can really assess that this is all working. But we try to make this more and more frequent as we can. Just, Marco, one more last question for you, because I know you've got some time pressures there and you have to head off. If there's any other questions for Marco, and I don't see any in the chat right now, but my last question for you is, you know, what's next? And there's a couple different ways you could answer this question. You could answer what's next for you in terms of what you would like to do and the types of things that you're getting involved in. Or what do you think is like, what's next for cities, right? Based on your experience and where we can go next. Well, I mean, I love this topic. I truly do. And I think that this particular aspect of community and community engagement is really going to be the future for cities. Especially with all of this. technology coming in and AI and all the capability of automation that it's already in the labs but not out. We will have a lot of, but a lot of work from the City Hall being able to be automated and the service that the City Hall provides being able to be decided, automated or managed by technology. And so we need really more and more the... community side of it. And so I think I just left the city hall, I went to the university, the local business university. I keep involving myself in projects of the city. I keep being called for discussions like this and I'm sure I will come up with some way of maintaining this. ability to help in growing city solutions. And, you know, as Jean was showing this capability of this digital twin solutions, we'll be able to allow us to test a lot, to get a lot of insights, get a lot of knowledge. You know, before spending 20 million euros on some infrastructure, really understanding what's going to happen with all the trends, all the variables working together. And then it will all come down to what does this community want? What do we want to build? Who do we want to be? How are we relating to one another? And how are we using all of this that we are implementing? For what sense? And so I'm... I'll keep trying helping Deloitte maintain this human focus while deploying technology. We thank you for that. And it sounds like you've got the perfect role ahead of you. It's about learning. It's about teaching. So we wish you the best of luck. Thank you. I know you got to go drop off. So thank you. Thank you, Marco, for this. Jean, just... Following up. You don't mind if I leave? Sorry. Please go ahead. Please. That's fine. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. Bye, guys. Joe, one of your slides you presented, you know, what we refer to as a two by two, right? Where you had kind of the models from objects to systems. And then you had real time versus offline data, right? And, you know, so those gives you four different quadrants. What have you seen for a city that's looking to maybe start their digital twin journey? Where do they start within those quadrants? And where do you see cities being successful starting? And then where do they kind of go from a roadmap perspective? I would say that it's normally on the right side of the matrix. So it's either a question about planning. and a lot of cities actually start on scenario-based planning and therefore on on historical data of the overall ecosystem. And the reason for managing ecosystems is because that's intrinsically the role of a city. It's very hard for the city to manage a closed system because mostly the overall urban landscape, it's interconnected and highly complex when it comes to the connections between different services. And therefore, I've seen a lot of cities starting from a planning perspective, and then moving towards more of an operate digital dream. The key aspect for that, and what normally becomes then a barrier, is that even from a planning perspective, you still need to have the data. You need to have good historical data that you can actually make sense of. You need to have common ontologies of different services so that you can understand what's actually linkable and what's not linkable, what kind of correlations exist, and what can you do with the different indicators you've got. And that's even more critical when it comes to the operation, because basically you can only have an integrated operation if you've got a seamless integration between services. So I'd say the criticality of integration becomes higher on the upper quadrant, because it's mostly the area where you need real-time data to engage and to really put things together. The impact of digital twins can happen both on real-time data or historical data. because there are multiple planning questions and Marco just shared scenarios or where cities are planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars and they would really need to know does this make sense in the future in two three four five years time when this construction is ready does it make sense to think about the city that way so that's that I would say is part of the scenario one thing I didn't mention I believe it would be relevant on some of the other questions is that Managing a city has a lot to do with open government. And then open government is three main components, right? It's about transparency, collaboration, if you want, and then having the right level of participation of people, right? So because people will only participate if there is trust, therefore if there's transparency for that, and participation will only be meaningful if there's collaboration, meaning that whatever you ask people about, you need to be able to act on it. And that is this. three elements become the core of the policies of well-managed cities these days. And that's also what makes it so that it's not a surprise every four or five years when there's elections, what's going to be the outcome of it. It's actually the result of a long-term relationship between the city management and their stakeholders. That's very interesting as well. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you, Jean. Thank you for your presentation and for taking those questions. I think that then brings us to the end. I see we've got a couple more minutes to go, but I don't see any questions in the chat. So Carolyn, I'll turn it back over to you.

All right. Thank you, Carolyn. I appreciate the introduction and welcome to everyone who's joined the call today.

I just wanted to do a quick introduction. My name is Joe Philbrook. I'm a Deloitte partner based in Vancouver, BC.

Prior to that, I was based in Toronto. So I do have a little bit of experience from both sides of the country and it's a pleasure to be with you today. I'll be your moderator for today's session. But it's my pleasure to introduce our two main guest speakers. First, Marco Espinheira, who is the former head of Future of Qasqai Portugal.

And we look forward to hearing from Marco to understand what the Future of Qasqai role meant to him and some of the great work that they did at Qasqai in Portugal. We're also joined by my Deloitte colleague. João Barroca from Portugal, and he is our global public sector digital modernization leader.

So we're closely with many cities and municipalities in Europe as well as internationally, and he'll be sharing with us today some of the impacts that leveraging data in your municipalities and creating digital twins may have on your ability to work and shape the future. We'll start off with short presentations by both Marco and Jean, and then we'll enter into a bit of a fireside chat type conversation where I have some questions prepared, but we'll also open the floor to you if you have any questions as well before we close the webinar. So with that said, I'll turn it over to firstly Marco to tell us the story of Qashqai and your role. Over to you.

Thanks, Joe. Hi, everyone. Let me just share my presentation here. So, hello, everyone.

It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm going to try and speak for less than 10 minutes. That was my commitment to Joe, so that we can have much more time to interact and to discuss and to for a dialogue.

So whenever we talk about cities and about data and technology in cities, I always start to asking everyone to visualize, close your eyes and visualize what is the city of the future. And for most of us, this is the picture that pops up. So we're used by popular culture, by movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report and all of these things in the future.

These cities are like this, right? And interestingly enough, and I always try and talk this because we are building the cities of the future and we are dealing with the technology. But if you think about that from Star Trek and Galactica 1999, everything that the futurists predict, it's actually coming true. So we have the self-driving cars, we have the... the communication devices of Star Trek.

We are very close to teleportation even with quantum technology. But the city itself really did not come true. The city itself is going opposite of that, completely different, much more in sync with ourselves as humans and with nature.

And so... Think about this when we are building the cities of the future based on technology, based on data. We definitely need to think about communities. And I show you these images because this sounds kind of very semantic and very romantic, but this is actually happening.

This is actually designed for a city that is being built in China. With that in mind, let me present you Cascais. Cascais is very close to Lisbon, 20 kilometers away from Lisbon. It's around 216,000 people. Interesting enough, as a very interesting characteristic, that 20% of those people are right now expats.

And we have a lot of nationalities here, 123. But 30% of our territory, our... 100 and almost 100 square kilometers of territory is a natural and reserved natural park. and we have 32 kilometers of coastline.

And so a lot of this positioning of Qashqaij is what I showed you, very sustainable, very close to nature, very focused on community. And when we came up with the strategy for the city, it was a strategy based on what we want the city to be. Again, no technology involved whatsoever. And so we wanted to contribute, the executive of this city hall wanted to contribute to create this city, to add to the legacy and making this city the best place to live.

And what do we think of when we think of the best place to live? Where would each and every one of us? If we had all the money in the world, no strings attached, if we can do whatever we wanted, where would we live?

It's very simple, actually. We would think of five needs that we have and that we think of when we want to choose a place to live. A place that has very good education, a place that has a very good health system. A place that has wonderful quality of space and environment, green and quality of air. Where we have, of course, cultural offer because we need other people, we need to have fun, we need to socialize.

And of course, we need to feel safe. This will vary depending on where we are, our history and our needs. I might place more importance on education, someone else might place more importance on safety.

but this is actually what we search for. And so this is where we set out to create value, never forgetting that we wanted really was to make a community, to make a place where people could enjoy and could actually live with their family. And so in this way, we came into managing the City Hall around 16 years ago.

And so we went directly into this notion of smart cities, not based on technology, not driven by technology, not even enabling some technological trends, but going directly to where we think a city should be, that is the co-creation with the citizens. And this sense of community, this sense of being able to, with the citizens, create a city, that is only possible with technology. but that's the end.

And so basically that's what we did, what we set out to do. We wanted to create a city where we have this capability of managing the citizens, we call it CRM but with the C standing for citizens, so citizen relationship management, but we could only do that because We had already all the groundwork laid out. So the city was already very much virtualized. And we were already seeing a lot of trends for citizens already in remote channels, not really digital, but very, very little pressure on the face-to-face because it's happening all over the world. And what we did do...

was to create this relationship management where we twisted the condition of citizen a little bit. And so think for a moment of a street that separates your municipality from the one next to it. I don't know about Canada, probably in Canada this doesn't happen.

but in the great Lisbon we have 17 municipalities. And so there is really a street that separates one municipality from the other. And what happens is that what then differentiates the person that lives on the left side of the street from the person that lives on the right side of the street. And what we came up to do is exactly this.

We were able to Being able to communicate, understand the citizens and create value for the condition of resident. This is what being a citizen for us is all about. In Cascais you are able to have free transportation system, you are able to have a health insurance, you are able to have free parking hours throughout the day depending on your condition. You can be a citizen, you can be a resident, you can be a student, you can be a worker, and we deal with that differently and we promote this relationship very closely together.

and we use this relationship to hear and to say and to make ourselves heard as well. And so with this in mind and with this platform, it was very fairly easy to move forward. So we started with a single contact solution.

There's only one number in Cascais, a free number where anyone can call to solve whatever problem. It doesn't matter if it's a cultural problem, a problem with the school of the kids, a trash residue problem or a mobility problem. This is one number only.

And of course, then the data start pouring in and we started having more data. We started understanding better the citizens and we started adding to the services. So that was being done in this operational control center. This was a partnership with Deloitte where we started having all of this data that we wanted to work and turn into service to the citizens.

When we could automated service to the citizens, when we could predicted service to the citizens. And when we were not able to do any of those things, just responded effectively and create a service level agreement that didn't exist before. And so we were able to change the paradigm and start communicating.

Instead of communicating everything to everyone, started really being specific and solving and let everyone know what we were doing. in a very specific profile with very specific personas. And so then we moved on to the mobility system that is multi-modal integrated mobility service. We were able to use data also from outside sources. We were able to use data to send data to outside sources like Waze, for instance, so that people could use the data that we're having, for instance, regarding works on their preferred channels.

And of course, with the residues, the waste management, we were also able to integrate this, being able to understand the needs very on top of the need so that we could respond easily. COVID hit, it was very easy for us to deploy information systems and cleaning systems, not everywhere like it happened to a lot of cities in Portugal, but we were able to create integrated with the hospitals and with the firemen and we understood where were the heat map, where were the points where infected people were coming up. in bigger numbers and we directed the cleaning services to those locations, especially to those bus routes and train routes. This was done in three days because we were able, the digital is able to allow us to build on top of this very easily and very fast.

And so we were using the beach cam that surfers used to see the surf. We were using that to count people and to tell people how were the beaches capacity going on. And so, I mean, there's several examples. I went through them very fast. We can come back to them afterwards.

But this was pretty much what I wanted to share with you very quickly. Just to finish and to come back to Joe's question about the head of future. We basically... We had the mayor that works like chairman, and then he delegated the executive powers on the deputy mayor that works like the CEO.

And then he had four... big municipal directors or city managers if one for the territory where all the you know the the the traffic the urban planning all of these things are and then the people that has three main areas education social and health and then the the present which is the day-to-day of the city law hr law, all of the finance, everything. And then we had the future that it was everything else, around 43% of the city hall that had from communication to IT, to strategic planning, to smart cities, cultures, tourism, sports, all the big investments and so forth. So that was it. I hope I went exceeded three minutes.

Perfect, Marco. Perfect. Perfect. That's excellent. Excellent.

I think introduction to the topic today. And I think as a side effect of your presentation, I think you're also advocating for tourism in Cascade. I'm sure there's lots of people on this call who now want to want to make a visit. But truly fascinating. And we'll come back to you with some questions a little bit later on during the during the webinar.

particularly fascinating on how the city created a role focused on the future not the not the present but how to evolve and and create solutions and capabilities to contribute to the future citizens of the of the city so we'll uh we need to have a role for the present as well okay we do yes yes yes um so then let's um what i'd like to do next uh jean if i can if i can you Turn over to you. You work with a lot of cities, both in Europe and internationally. You work very closely with Qasqai.

What are you seeing as a trend? What are you seeing other municipalities and cities do? How are they leveraging data, technology to achieve some of the outcomes that Marco talked about?

Yeah. Thanks a lot Joe and thanks a lot for inviting us. It's always a pleasure to join Marco in these conversations about Cascais because of the journey we've done together but also on how passionate Marco is about the topic and how knowledgeable he also is about all the things that Cascais has been doing around these smart city engagements.

So when it comes to more of a global perspective, I think it would be good to start with a short presentation. I would drill down a bit on one of the aspects that we see more and more cities trying to target, which is exactly the topic of digital twins. I'll take the risk of sharing my presentation.

I hope it works. Rosa, because I slightly changed the slides since I sent it to you, Joe, because this is, let's call it, oh, it didn't work. Is it working? We can see it.

Yeah, it's there. Okay. I was going to say that because Marco was a few minutes late.

It gave me the opportunity to actually create the slide on in real time. So I went to a night cafe. It didn't work. You froze up there for a second, but you're back. You're back now.

Yeah, I was, I was just sharing that I went on, on, um, I went on Night Cafe, which is basically a generative AI algorithm for images. And I asked them, I inserted a description of what to me the city of the future is. And those images you just saw were the images that resulted from the algorithm, which is extremely interesting. So the things I said was, look at the city, think about autonomous vehicles, some of the parking spaces being taken as green spaces for people to actually enjoy.

and tell me what a city of the future will look like. And this was the result of the work, which is extremely interesting, as you can see. So a lot of green spaces, cities that are more livable, that's exactly what cities are trying to have.

If I move the slide, okay. So you can see that there are still vehicles. Some of them are autonomous.

Probably some of them will be flying, as Marco was sharing. But the overall is that... The city of the future needs to accommodate people that live with quality of life, that have a good sustainable balance between nature and conviviality and also a sustainable balance between economic activity and all the creativity boosts that the cities bring to overall world development.

And within all of these, and there are many trends that we're looking at when it comes to cities worldwide, and some of them are connected to green areas such as green planning of public spaces or even the 15-minute city. There are topics that are mostly connected to digital technologies such as the usage of AI. and digital twins, and I'll be talking about digital twins today.

And then there are social topics such as mass participation of people using digital technologies, or even, I would say, equality and inclusion being one of the topics that a lot of cities are addressing. So when it comes to data and cities, I would tend to think that the most updated paradigm of a smart city or a city has to do with digital twins. And digital twins are... digital copies of physical systems, in the cases of cities, that create capacity to monitor real-time world cities or even to enable what-if scenarios analysis that really enable us to do two things. On the one hand, near real-time operational support, but then also scenario-based analysis of what can come and what can happen and better prepare for impredicted things.

It does enable these aids. key topics. So predictive analysis, scenario simulation, operation optimization, but then simulation for the investment and justification of future improvements, KPIs, integration of let's say combination of reality and virtuality, and then intellectual interventions and accurate mapping. So if we are to focus on what kind of Z-digital twins exist these days in cities, we're mostly talking about four paradigms. The first one is connected to models of objects on real time.

And this is mostly connected to, for instance, people willing to control a specific machine, a specific device that is critical for a certain operation. Then we've got still on real-time operations, the operations of the ecosystem. And this is, for instance, what we've got in place in Qashqai, which is a digital twin that enables us to have a real-time visualization of what's happening in the city. and have a real-time data integration that allows us to have optimized operations and really tackle the root cause analysis of a problem and send the right team to fix it.

And then we've got with offline data two paradigms as well, product design, so the optimization of the design of the specific products, or then the scenario-based planning which is normally applicable to cities mostly in complex ecosystems such as mobility planning or even urban planning. So for instance, There are some cities we've been working with, which are planning a variety of perspectives, ranging from the location of houses, location of schools, and some public services as well. So the optimized location of public services, but also dynamic allocation of ambulances to prevent that in case of a disaster, there is a specific time of response. So all of these scenarios. are being addressed by cities through the aggregation of data with AI capabilities and analytics capabilities.

Another perspective is then a variety of scenarios that range these two main paradigms, operations and planning. When we're talking about operations, we can be talking about optimization of journeys or customized experiences where I can really deliver a tailored service for a person because I have an integration of all the interactions person has with me and therefore i can really know the preferences the historical analysis and i can really tailor to specific characteristics the kind of service that makes more sense but then we've got the integrated city management that if we want combines both the operation in the planning scenarios so integration the integrated city management from our perspective is what really raises operational awareness and situational awareness where i can either tackle my operational perspectives or activate scenario-based planning. So for instance, in situations of not only, let's say, not only strategy for policies, but also on scenario-based planning for operational purposes, I can activate this perspective on more from a planning perspective of the management of the city. There are a few components that are critical for a digital twin, and I'd like to share a bit of this as well. I'd like to start, of course, by data sources and streams.

Whenever we talk about a digital twin, we need to have a digitized service or a digitized device, right? Because otherwise, it's very hard to put the digital twin together. Then on top of it, on top of the raw data that we're generating, we need to have the capacity to... ingest the data and process the data, which is normally done through the cloud infrastructure with a core digital twin infrastructure that allows all the integration services. On top of these infrastructures, we then put together the applications, the visualizations, and the most important aspect of a digital twin is that it enables decision and actions.

This is normally not a technology challenge, this is much more of a governance challenge. And the governance challenges, I believe, range all the layers that I just presented. Because sometimes it is very hard to get on hold of the data. So data governance is still an issue. Data sharing mechanisms is still an issue.

And even if you want, even starting from the procurement processes, just the fact that we are procuring services that are, or products that are compliant with certain standards that then enable to have this data integration, sometimes in some geographies, it might be challenging. It is a governance issue when it comes to then have GDPR compliance and privacy regulations and even ethical regulations that will regulate what kind of applications we can be designing and how do we respect the liberties of people. And it again becomes a governance issue on how can I bring the visual services and the visualizations and the insights I'm generating to real decision making and to an impact in society as well. So a few of the why a smart city needs a use cases, a few of the use cases we have seen a lot better use of resources and therefore to more better monitor and optimize how the city is operating, improved resilience and this is mostly when we talk about extreme risks such as climate change mitigation or even addressing extreme events, increased competitiveness because we strongly believe that data ecosystems are part of what the city competitiveness is about these days. So whatever data we've got in the ecosystem will enrich the capacity of our startups, organizations, our academia, but even our public sector to generate better services.

And lastly, sustainability, so that we've got a better grasp of what needs to be the good decision making in terms of the different angles of sustainability. And the last one, which I've addressed on the previous slide as well, better decision making. provided that we've got the right governance processes to act on the data.

And then the last slide about what capabilities exist and what the Digital Twin is about. I really love this Digital Twin capabilities periodic table that comes out of the Digital Twin Consortium. And it has this six aggregation of layers from data services, integration, management, intelligence, and then EOI.

UX and trustworthiness. And I would say that these capabilities end up being the critical ones. Can you hear me? Yeah, I think you froze up there for a moment, John, but you're back.

Okay. I think there's something probably wrong with my computer because we're surviving. We're here. We've lost your screen share, but we can still hear you and see you. So I was just sharing about those capabilities is that those capabilities are critical for them to understand the variety of perspectives that Digital Twin can create in certain geographies or in a specific city.

We've seen cities that were more interested in the metaverse, cities that were more interested in simulation capabilities, cities that were more interested on optimization capabilities. But the crucial part to take into consideration is that by the end of the day, I would say it's not only the visualization that creates the digital twin, it starts on the data ingestion, the interoperability, the right data governance, and then the digital twin will happen. And that I believe is one of the critical aspects we have seen across cities across the globe. That was part of the learnings we got from Qashqai while implementing these solutions. of the relevance of the right or proper governance and the proper capacity to act on the data, which is becoming more and more critical these days when we talk about the relevance of data in urban ecosystems.

I'll stop here so that we can still have some time for questions. That's great, John. Thank you for your presentation.

And I think one of the things that I've heard now from from each of you or one of the things that in your presentations you mentioned was the importance of having that foundation right like getting in place what I might refer to as some of the building blocks that enable you then to build digital services, digital twins, these types of use cases that benefit citizens. So maybe, you know, Marco, I turn to you first with my first question about, you know, what enabled you to have the mandate or call it the permission to... start to invest and build these foundational capabilities. What was the civic driver?

Was it sustainability and climate? You had some use cases around that in your presentation. Were there other drivers as well that led the city to go down this path? Let me just address the question of Peter that he put on the message on board.

It has to do about the... Give me just a second. It has to do about the percentage used in the different channels of the remote service because it has a little bit to do with what Jean was showing as well. Because, and your question as well about the foundation, of course we needed to make sure that people have the capability of having all of these different channels and so you cannot build one specific channel you can tell people that go to the to the store telling them so you just lost one hour next time you can just call or next time you can just send an email or next time you can even do it on the web or on the app and and that will drive a lot of people towards the digital channels.

And of course the center itself also recognizes this because the information goes into the center via the telephone or email, which is basically the same thing. It's a human interaction and so we have someone there then digitalizing all of these services. But then if it goes through the web or through the app, it already goes in a very structured way. People already choose, this is what I want, my problem, and this is my question and so forth. And so we can already immediately direct that to a specific team.

And then it can also go automatically through sensors, through a parking sensor, for instance, that says that a spot is occupied or not occupied. And we keep processing that information. And that's super important.

when it comes to allowing people to get to know only one number and then realize that they can do a lot of things remotely. And then from there on to a website or to an app or even being automated some things, it's very, very easy. So going back to your question, Joe, this initial... drive to be digital, it's connected to our vision of the city. And so we want, we firmly believe in building a community that is able to dialogue and to build itself.

And for that, I mean, we have one of the best participatory budgets on the planet, according to the World Bank. And that's not by chance. We really believe in that.

But it's impossible to manage and to have this kind of coordination with 250,000 citizens at the same time. And so we, as cities grew bigger from when we were living in small villages, and as cities grew bigger, we always created problems that we were able to solve. And right now the problem is huge metropolises. So we're just too many in the city.

But right now, we also have the tools to be able to solve that problem, which is technology. And so that was the main drive. We need technology to make our vision come true.

Otherwise, it will not happen. Right, right. No, I think that's extremely interesting. Kind of leads me to my next question. And, John, this one is for you.

I mean, you talked about having, actually, you both mentioned about having a view of the citizen, right? So understanding and all the different ways that the citizen interacts. with the city, right?

Kind of like a customer relationship management or Marco, as you call it, a citizen relationship management view, right? Which allows you to deliver individualized services to citizens. How do you, how did you achieve the balance or Jean, I guess for you, like, how do you, how do you advise around the balance of having all this information about citizens on one hand versus maybe some requirements around? privacy and you talked about governance a lot in your presentation as well so how do you balance between those two that that's actually a very interesting question we just launched a global report calling called the digital digital citizen survey and um we actually asked that question to people uh and we did that in multiple countries across the globe so um And we also did it across different levels of government. Curiously enough, people, when it comes to city-level relationships, they tend to prioritize personal contact.

And the reason for that is quite clear as well. It also has to do with the nature of services being provided by cities, right? Because some of them are social services, and they really require some physical presence. But we actually have asked people what kind of data would be comfortable to share and under which conditions.

And truth is that people are willing to share their data provided that they get better services and that they can understand and control what kind of data is being shared. One of the paradigms we've got for government relationship is also a once-only principle. It gets very frustrating when...

The different public entities request the same information that has as a source actually a public entity in itself, right? So we see a lot of that. And that's something that we see more and more public services trying to address, either through interoperability or through better regulation and governance as well. Of course, there are principles that need to be taken into consideration, and those are the ethical boundaries of what should and should not be done, but also the privacy regulation.

But there are also ways of better involving and creating general awareness about what can be the art of the possible and what's happening, but at the same time, actually what data sets are being used. And I believe more and more these movements start to appear, even though, let's say, the level of maturity of some public services is not addressing that at this stage, which is even to have some data. or even some privacy dashboards, but I would know which kind of data different government entities are using from myself. And actually, I would be able to acknowledge that I'm willing to share the data or revoke the access if I want to, to give you a very specific example.

Let me just add to this, Joe, we feel that a lot. So this is not the right crowd to ask, but if you in any room ask. Who are you going to trust more, central government, corporations, or city halls? I can assure you that, you know, all the hands go to the city halls, because it's a very different kind of government. We're very, very close to people.

And so that tends to create relationships. People are being heard. Their problems are being solved.

And if they're not, you know, the mayor goes down the street and someone points at him and says, you didn't do this or that on my street. And that doesn't happen anywhere else. And the other thing is that what John just said, I think, and I've always felt that that's the huge difference from the data protection laws that we have to the data protection laws that we should have.

It's because it's not who has my data, it's what is the entity that has my data. doing with the data that matters. And we have no idea what people are doing with the data. And we're just being asked to allow someone to have the data or not. That's not a question.

That's not even important. I would like to know every time that someone, whoever it is, uses my data. Because getting the data is not difficult at all.

Any relationship, commercial relation will ask you, will you give me the data so that I can provide the service? Duh. Yeah, that's very interesting how it shifts from preventing people from having your data to having a voice or a say in how your data is being used. And if you feel there's value or services being provided to you through the use of your data, as Jean, as you said, you're okay with that at that point. Let me just give you...

One more piece of information. So for some of these decisions, again, going back to community, I can have, I'm 20 kilometers away from Lisbon. I can have a completely different policy on data and privacy and everything that Lisbon has. And so what we encourage here for... for instance, on CCTVs on the street.

So we just set out to come up with a project for CCTVs, but we created a citizen panel where we, you know, hear them. So do you think that the CCTV should recognize faces or not? Should we keep the images for 24 hours or for a week? Should we read license plates or not?

And why? And so we bring experts on these matters. We have them tell the benefits and the disadvantages of each of the questions. And then we can hear them. And so, again, this is something that it's not inevitable.

We are building this and we should build this. Yeah. Yeah, Marco, one of the things that struck me when you were speaking was you called it stage three, I think, was the co-creation stage, right? Where you're working closely with citizens to design the services and the digital capabilities that they want, right?

Maybe share a little bit more about that experience, right? So it sounds to me like you had a very high level of participation from citizens. a willingness to participate, a desire to maybe even contribute in some way to building some of these digital services. What was that relationship like between City Hall and the citizens, so to speak?

You're on mute. You're on mute, Marco. Joe, I'm sorry.

I need to understand the question a little bit better. Yeah, yeah. So...

So... Your stage three of your maturity was co-creation, right? Co-creation. Yeah, right.

And so my question is about how was your how did you what was that relationship between City Hall and the citizens like? What kind of input did you get from citizens that you were able to leverage? That was not a stage.

So that was basically where we started. our smart city vision. So those three stages were historically, and so we jumped right onto the third one.

Again, before we had this digital platform, we were already creating the participatory budget. We were already doing in the schools. We are already showing what is a budget plan for the city. We are already showing the kids how we create and how do we manage public spending. We are already talking to the parents and having them come, giving us the opportunity to listen to them on specific decisions.

And so in every... aspect of what we do we try to keep this channel open we try to understand what people would do differently and how is it would be possible for for for them to do better or to think that we could do something else and so um it's i think that the only the only answer that i can give you is that You know, we had the elections one year ago and we, you know, reinforced the voting in the executive that is in front of the... of the city hall.

And so, unfortunately, we don't have a P&L like all the other institutions. And so we have one KPI that is every five years we have general elections. And that's when we can really assess that this is all working.

But we try to make this more and more frequent as we can. Just, Marco, one more last question for you, because I know you've got some time pressures there and you have to head off. If there's any other questions for Marco, and I don't see any in the chat right now, but my last question for you is, you know, what's next?

And there's a couple different ways you could answer this question. You could answer what's next for you in terms of what you would like to do and the types of things that you're getting involved in. Or what do you think is like, what's next for cities, right? Based on your experience and where we can go next.

Well, I mean, I love this topic. I truly do. And I think that this particular aspect of community and community engagement is really going to be the future for cities.

Especially with all of this. technology coming in and AI and all the capability of automation that it's already in the labs but not out. We will have a lot of, but a lot of work from the City Hall being able to be automated and the service that the City Hall provides being able to be decided, automated or managed by technology. And so we need really more and more the... community side of it.

And so I think I just left the city hall, I went to the university, the local business university. I keep involving myself in projects of the city. I keep being called for discussions like this and I'm sure I will come up with some way of maintaining this.

ability to help in growing city solutions. And, you know, as Jean was showing this capability of this digital twin solutions, we'll be able to allow us to test a lot, to get a lot of insights, get a lot of knowledge. You know, before spending 20 million euros on some infrastructure, really understanding what's going to happen with all the trends, all the variables working together. And then it will all come down to what does this community want?

What do we want to build? Who do we want to be? How are we relating to one another?

And how are we using all of this that we are implementing? For what sense? And so I'm...

I'll keep trying helping Deloitte maintain this human focus while deploying technology. We thank you for that. And it sounds like you've got the perfect role ahead of you.

It's about learning. It's about teaching. So we wish you the best of luck. Thank you. I know you got to go drop off.

So thank you. Thank you, Marco, for this. Jean, just...

Following up. You don't mind if I leave? Sorry. Please go ahead.

Please. That's fine. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.

Bye, guys. Joe, one of your slides you presented, you know, what we refer to as a two by two, right? Where you had kind of the models from objects to systems.

And then you had real time versus offline data, right? And, you know, so those gives you four different quadrants. What have you seen for a city that's looking to maybe start their digital twin journey? Where do they start within those quadrants?

And where do you see cities being successful starting? And then where do they kind of go from a roadmap perspective? I would say that it's normally on the right side of the matrix. So it's either a question about planning. and a lot of cities actually start on scenario-based planning and therefore on on historical data of the overall ecosystem.

And the reason for managing ecosystems is because that's intrinsically the role of a city. It's very hard for the city to manage a closed system because mostly the overall urban landscape, it's interconnected and highly complex when it comes to the connections between different services. And therefore, I've seen a lot of cities starting from a planning perspective, and then moving towards more of an operate digital dream. The key aspect for that, and what normally becomes then a barrier, is that even from a planning perspective, you still need to have the data. You need to have good historical data that you can actually make sense of.

You need to have common ontologies of different services so that you can understand what's actually linkable and what's not linkable, what kind of correlations exist, and what can you do with the different indicators you've got. And that's even more critical when it comes to the operation, because basically you can only have an integrated operation if you've got a seamless integration between services. So I'd say the criticality of integration becomes higher on the upper quadrant, because it's mostly the area where you need real-time data to engage and to really put things together.

The impact of digital twins can happen both on real-time data or historical data. because there are multiple planning questions and Marco just shared scenarios or where cities are planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars and they would really need to know does this make sense in the future in two three four five years time when this construction is ready does it make sense to think about the city that way so that's that I would say is part of the scenario one thing I didn't mention I believe it would be relevant on some of the other questions is that Managing a city has a lot to do with open government. And then open government is three main components, right?

It's about transparency, collaboration, if you want, and then having the right level of participation of people, right? So because people will only participate if there is trust, therefore if there's transparency for that, and participation will only be meaningful if there's collaboration, meaning that whatever you ask people about, you need to be able to act on it. And that is this. three elements become the core of the policies of well-managed cities these days. And that's also what makes it so that it's not a surprise every four or five years when there's elections, what's going to be the outcome of it.

It's actually the result of a long-term relationship between the city management and their stakeholders. That's very interesting as well. Okay.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Jean. Thank you for your presentation and for taking those questions. I think that then brings us to the end. I see we've got a couple more minutes to go, but I don't see any questions in the chat.

So Carolyn, I'll turn it back over to you.

Transcript for:Smart Cities and Digital Twins Overview

Transcript for:
Smart Cities and Digital Twins Overview