SMART CITIES WITH AN EXPERT MR. BORIS KOPRIVNIKAR AT RE:CONNECT THE WORLD’S LARGEST REAL ESTATE WEB CONFERENCE
Cities manage a substantial volume of real estate assets and are also responsible for 30-40% of business activity. That makes city governments one of the largest real estate portfolio managers. However, these portfolios are very diversified as is the city administration with many departments and institutions. All these facts contribute to difficult asset management and communication among stakeholders.
We need to have one software that can support all the data related to a real estate management. There must be a two-way integration. We need to have a simple access to data and data need to be open for other services, then we have a standard component of a smart city… Structure and location of data need to be clear to a local community, so they can if needed take this data at any time and move them to another solution… Data always need to follow the client.
Which are than the key pain points of a real estate management by local governments? We have lots of real estate, we have different departments where each manage their relevant real estate or their area of real estate management (legal, maintenance, leasing…) but do not have a unique management system. In practice there are several parallel systems, which do serve their purpose but with the growth of volume are more and more difficult to manage and connect. Therefore, we need to collect all real estate relevant data, connect them, and simplify the processes. We need to convince different departments and institutions to share data among each other because this is the only way for each of them to do their job best and fastest. We need to establish a unique and comprehensive ecosystem for real estate management for which we need a comprehensive and open software solution.
Software solutions for real estate management need to be simple enough for end users (city administration) and comprehensive enough and open to be able to connect in a common data lake and with other solutions in other areas. It is recommended these are in cloud (SaaS) as this relives city administration of intensive IT support and investment costs in hardware. Cloud based data are also more flexible for (mobile) use and migrations. Namely city governments need to have open possibilities (exit strategies) to choose the best solutions for specific areas and possibility to migrate data in new environments, therefore a good understanding and direct access to data is crucial to prevent dependence on one provider (vendor lock-in).
“The most important with designing smart cities is to collect data, understand them, connect them and based on them build modern digital services for city administration, citizens, companies and other institutions. Better data for better decisions and less manual work and more time for creative work.” Mr. Koprivnikar summarized to close the session.
