Smart City initiatives are a vital way for local governments to respond to their mounting challenges. However, cities are complex systems and Smart City strategies can lose focus and impact if not managed well.

No matter where a city lies within their Smart City transformation journey, establishing a clear baseline maturity level is a fundamental element in evaluating the current state and providing a focus for future Smart City plans and ambitions. In the spirit of ‘what you can’t measure, you can’t manage’, a baseline maturity assessment helps a city to understand itself and track its progress into the future.

Undertaking a Smart City maturity assessment can also help a city in a number of other ways, including:

• Taking stock of its current state, providing a clear launch-pad for Smart City visions and plans.
• Helping to demystify the critical components that make up a Smart City. By its nature, a city is a complex system of systems. By deconstructing these systems into key components such as stakeholder management, technology, governance and so on (and then the various sub-components within each), a maturity assessment can clearly illustrate the key ‘moving parts’ that should be considered in the Smart City journey.
• Establishing the basis for building a business case and associated funding allocations.
• Determining where a City sits relative to its peers – on both the Australian and global stage; what is the appropriate level of maturity as benchmarked against cities with similar populations, challenges and so on?
• Bringing the various stakeholders along with the journey – such that they feel invested in the process by being given a chance to participate in it.

To help achieve this, KPMG have developed a Smart City Maturity Assessment as part of an overarching Smart City framework to help local government leaders answer some common questions:

• What are the defining characteristics of a Smart City?
• How can we go about baselining and measuring our levels of Smart City maturity?
• How can we obtain a holistic view across agencies and departments?
• What are we doing well and what could we be doing better?
• How does out Smart City maturity level compare with cities similar in nature to ours?
• How do we navigate the complex eco-system to help solve some of our key challenges?
• How can we plan and execute a program of continuous improvement in the pursuit of a Smart City strategy?
• How do we set clear, realistic and measurable Smart City goals?

Based on TM Forum’s established and proven ‘Smart City Maturity and Benchmark Model (TR259)’, the KPMG Smart City Maturity Model has been designed to capture the key aspects of a city's transformation journey to becoming a smarter city.

• The Smart City Maturity Model takes an end-to-end holistic view across city agencies and departments.
• The Model draws from a large number of reputable sources in the urban innovation field, ranging from standards and industry organisations to policy and best practices organisations.
• The Model allows a city to quickly assess its strengths and weaknesses across five key dimension areas related to city ‘smartness’.
• The assessment allows cities of any size to benchmark and compare how they are progressing against cities similar in nature to theirs.
• Cities can then set clear and realistic goals as to how they wish to pursue a transformation to becoming a Smarter City.

The Smart City Maturity Model is grouped into five dimension areas, each representing a major aspect of a Smart City transformation. The first four dimension areas allow a city to assess capabilities that are necessary for the city to become a truly Smart City, whilst the final dimension allows the city to assess how far it has already integrated the notion of ‘smartness’ into the different aspects of city life.

Completing a Smart City Maturity Assessment is not a one off, stand-alone exercise. Instead, it sets a strong baseline from which you can measure and track your city’s progression and improvement on defined areas, into the future. As you complete the agreed initiatives, progress can be tracked through re-assessments over time.

KPMG’s Smart City Maturity Assessment is designed to be a simple and cost-effective method of helping build a strong and sustainable capability, right-sized and contextual to your own requirements.