NBN, IBM drive Geraldton's tech vision


By GovTechReview Staff
Friday, 19 April, 2013


Its geographic isolation may not make it an obvious centre for technology innovation, but the City of Greater Geraldton (CGG) has been punching well above its weight when it comes to forward thinking – and the trend is only set to continue with its recent selection as one of just two Australian cities chosen to receive funding under IBM’s $50m Smart Cities Challenge program.

That program, which will see 100 cities embracing technology to improve quality of life and efficiency of urban spaces, chose the far-north Queensland city of Townsville as its first Australian recipient, last year. But with the program set to terminate in 2013, CGG chief executive officer Tony Brun tells GTR that the award puts the upstart town – a resources-driven city of 40,000 that lies midway up WA’s coastline, some 424km north of Perth – in good company.

“It’s a good brand to be associated with,” he explains. “The fact that it’s constrained to 100 cities worldwide means that only 99 other cities will ever be able to wear that badge. It’s a brand we hope we can use and market quite extensively in terms of educating the world about who we are and what we do.” Geraldton has been firing on all cylinders lately to boost its profile as a centre of innovation. In 2011, the city won the United Nations Environment Program International Liveable Communities Award for community empowerment and engagement; secured Geraldton as one of the stops on the Clipper Ventures 2011/12 Round the World Yacht Race; and beat out 129 other competitors to secure a final-seven position in European media giant Bertelsmann’s Richard Mohn global prize for deliberative democracy.

The push to become recognised as a smart city reflects a growing acceptance at the local- government level that technologies of all stripes can be massive drivers of productive change in everything from administration to citizen services. Research firm IDC, for one, maintains an IDC Smart Cities Index to compare various cities’ progress in core areas and in April debuted an energy-related scaling system called the IDC Energy Insights Smart Cities Maturity Model.

“The smart city journey is a multifaceted transformation, and there are many steps to consider,” says IDC Energy Insights senior research analyst Gaia Gallotti. “Since the smart city journey will never be a walk in the park, it is crucial to have the appropriate processes in place, sustained by strong leadership, strong innovation capabilities and collective intelligence, the right governance, adequate financial resources, and the right amount of flexibility.”

IBM’s accolade addresses these areas and dovetails with Geraldton’s selection as the first city in Australia to be fully covered by the rapidly expanding national broadband network (NBN). Brun is determined to capitalise upon this position to ensure the IBM Smart Cities Challenge grant – which includes $400,000 worth of consulting in which a half-dozen IBM consultants will spend three weeks living in Geraldton and preparing research reports charting its technological direction – becomes a springboard to ensure the region gets the full benefits of the NBN.

Brun has already elucidated three core areas of focus for the town’s evolution: smart energy projects that will increase renewable energy usage and customer engagement; community service, which will look at ways that CGG can engage with other local, state and Commonwealth agencies to streamline permits, licensing and other administrative matters; and a big-data stream, which will look at ways Geraldton can leverage its position and NBN primacy to become a telecommunications hub for the entire north-west of Australia.

“We’re positioning ourselves as a centre of data services, storage, and support services for the whole of the region,” Brun explains. “The way they’ve architected the NBN means we’re the only point of interconnect north of Perth – and that makes us no different than the old telephone exchange, but for the whole of the northwest.”

“We’re going to look at ways to leverage that and create new industries here in Geraldton that can service it,” he continues. “The beauty is that with just 40,000 people we’re small in the context of things; the numbers are small enough that we can start rolling out new services on the NBN, but do a technology demonstration rollout across the whole population We’ve got the foundations of an economy built on innovation, and on top of that we can build an ideas economy that can grow.” – David Braue

This case study originally appeared in the April/May 2012 issue of GTR.

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