Recently, IDC Government Insights hosted a web conference titled, “IDC Government Insights 2014 Predictions: Worldwide Smart Cities,” highlighting market predictions for this year.
The session provided organizations (and government agencies) with insight and perspective on long-term industry trends along with new themes on the horizon. The Predictions web conference series is designed to help company leaders capitalize on emerging market opportunities and plan for future growth.
“This is going to be a big year for Smart Cities. Cities will move more quickly from research and evaluation to investment in pilots and the organizational structures to support SmartCity initiatives,” said Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, Research Director, IDC Government Insights Smart Cities Strategies. “We predict that in 2014 there will be a lot of partnership activity as vendors define their SmartCity offerings and strive to gain customer mindshare.”
The Top 10 Predictions are:
In 2014,15% of cities in the world will be in the Opportunistic Stage of Smart City maturity
Shadow IT will be a major source of departmental level innovation but will threaten SmartCity roadmaps
The key enabler of omni-channel citizen experience will be mobile
The business case for NextGen311 investment will be based on operational performance transformation value and not just customer service
Open data sets and open APIs will start to affect policy decision-making
Leading edge cities experiment with gamification as first step to nudge citizen behavior change
Worldwide SmartCity spending on the Internet of Things will be $265 billion in 2014
In 2014, Smart Cities will redirect 15-20% of traditional IT spending to the cloud
45% of all big data use cases will be in financial performance, public safety, and transportation
Competition heats up and there is significant M&A and partnership activity as vendors better define their offerings.
