It is an exciting time to be part of a city administration team. The proliferation of technologies across the social, mobile, analytics and cloud(SMAC) spectrum means more services can be delivered in exciting new ways. However, the pace of change means evaluating appropriate technology needs to be also done in different ways. Relying on months long procurement processes can lead to loss opportunities and risk citizen dissatisfaction. We, as consumers, are all more accustomed to new services coming online in a matter of days, and expect the same from our local public services.
Over the past few months we have had numerous enquiries from administrators on how best to keep up-to-date with capabilities available in the market. Individual vendors are doing an amazing job publishing their view of what’s possible and sharing case studies. However, for city technology buyers, a fuller scan looking across the marketplace is as important as understanding the capabilities of individual vendors.
At PublicTechViews, our primary research goal has been to look at how cities are adopting technology. So far we have focused entirely on writing about cities themselves. However, in response to the strength of demand, we are now embarking on a technology vendor survey. Our interest is only to understand how offerings have evolved to meet the demands of city administration. If you are a Technology vendor with a compelling offering for city administrators we encourage you to contact as and be part of this study.
In order to include as many of the leading benders as possible we are keeping our research focused on five key factors that are of interest to the buyer community:
- Changes to the technology portfolio – across the technology spectrum, vendor’s have been updating their offerings packages and pricing quite aggressively. Instead of capturing the entire portfolio, we are primarily interested in what has changed since the end of 2012
- Capability investments – New offerings are only real if capabilities have scaled to deliver. Here we would like to understand investments that have been made in R&D, manufacturing, software or consulting capability
- Reference case studies – like most buyers city administrators take comfort from successful implementation of the offerings they are reviewing. We are keen to build a library of referenceable case studies as easy source for our readers
- Partnering – The increasing complexity of jobs we are expecting technology to perform means very often a number of vendors work together on projects or programmes. Understanding strategic alliances and frequent partnerships is one way buyers can gain confidence in the delivery capability
- Business growth – The long-term sustainability of a vendor will be predicated on the business growth ambitions they invest for. Understanding this will help buyers profile their risk more effectively