At a hackathon in Cambridge, Mass., a team created an app called Rounds that tracks the interaction between health care workers and patients after receiving data from sensors in hospital rooms or from an app that allows health care workers to input data via smartphones or tablets. Another hackathon in Austin, Texas, helped launch Measr[food], a smart food scale that measures portion size and calorie content and connects to the Internet to coordinate with other online programs such as fitness trackers, with the ultimate goal of reducing the obesity rate in America. And Pop Quiz, an app that allows students to take quizzes from any mobile device and pushes real-time analytics and dashboards to teachers and parents was the result of a hackathon in Redwood City, Calif.
The idea of hackathons or other citizen-driven innovations supporting governments’ missions isn’t new, but what is unique about these hackathon examples is they are all supporting the expansion of the Internet of Everything (IoE). A relatively new trend to the commercial sector, and especially to state and local government, the IoE is the networked connection of people, processes, data and things. For government, the IoE has the potential to make a huge impact. According to Cisco, the IoE Value at Stake – the potential value that can be created by public sector organizations based on their ability to harness IoE by 2022 – will be $4.6 trillion for the public sector worldwide. But harnessing the power of the IoE can seem daunting for cash- and resource-strapped municipalities. Luckily, they don’t have to go it alone. By tapping into the collective power of citizens, governments can get a jump start on fueling the expansion of the IoE in their communities.
Two converging trends are expanding the role of citizens in the IoE. First is the pervasiveness of mobile devices. As of January 2014, 90 percent of adults in the U.S. had a cell phone, 58 percent had a smartphone and 42 percent had a tablet. Citizens now have anytime online access to their bank and credit card accounts, and can shop, pay bills and make appointments among other things. Due to the convenience of managing their personal lives online, citizens have come to expect the same 24/7 online service from their government.
“Citizens’ access to mobile devices is opening up the world of IT to them and setting expectations of how their government should provide those types of services back to them,” says Dan Kent, Cisco’s US Public Sector Senior Director of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer, who has been at the forefront of the IoE government transformation. “It absolutely becomes a forcing function for government to change.”
The second trend is the open data movement in government. Calls for transparency, among other factors, have driven governments to make their data public. For instance, as part of the Miami Dade Smart City project, the county plans to consolidate data analytics around finance, human resources, budgeting and planning, and to provide users with access to the government’s financial information online.
“Governments are beginning to realize that citizens themselves have the means to create their own applications and bring relevant and innovative IoE solutions to the table. Rather than governments implementing large systems or programs to address citizen needs, they are giving more data sets to the public and having citizens or other small businesses create unique applications leveraging those data sets,” says Kent.
The public’s involvement in the expansion of the IoE is truly a win-win for both citizens and government. Citizens can start to find solutions to some of the most nagging problems in their day-to-day lives and even improve safety and spur economic development in their communities. Governments will become more productive and efficient and lower costs in the process – resulting in less tax dollars being spent on new initiatives, programs or applications.
So how can governments start encouraging their citizens to support the growth of the IoE? Kent says an easy first step is to “Start with the current data you have, make it available and give citizens creative license – through a hackathon or competition, for instance – to do something different with that data and connect it in new and interesting ways.” Kent also recommends hiring a chief innovation officer or appointing a chief technology officer to foster this model and build relationships with your citizens.
For Kent, involving the public in the expansion of the IoE isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. “Municipalities have to change their mindset that they know what is best for the citizens. They should let someone outside government look at data and use it for something it was never intended for,” he says. “That is how I think the next generation of the Internet will thrive. You can’t be living in the same box you were living in and try to get this new, connected and innovative world to happen.”
For more information, visit the “10 Major Insights about the Internet of Everything in the Public Sector” and “Pay Attention IT: A New Convergence is Afoot.”
