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A coordinated approach

Cities are already home to most people on the planet. The current level of urbanisation of the population in Africa is 40%. All regions are expected to follow this trend towards greater urbanisation over the next three decades. As populations grow and cities become even more populated and complex to manage and maintain sustainably, resource and budget constraints are typically top of mind.

Kevin Buret, MD, Sukema Integrated Solutions.

But just as important to efficient and sustainable service delivery, a town or a city also needs to be safe. Cities need to respond quickly and effectively to emergencies and incidents, while keeping citizens, businesses and properties safe.

The previous Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, Councillor Parks Tau, has said, “A smart city is about how you apply technology to advance your own objectives and configure technology to support what you want to do.” Smart Cities provide the services needed for the constituents to live well, be safe, economically empowered and for businesses to thrive. Cities are constantly looking to:

• Do more with less: being more efficient across the whole city, thus saving costs.

• Do it better: being more effective, increasing the quality of the services.

• Do new things: being innovative by utilising new opportunities and experimenting with new concepts.

• Enhance citizen experience and interaction through new emerging technologies.

• Strengthen decision making, accountability, transparency with improved insights.

• Manage and optimise resource utilisation and productivity.

• Provide better living standards and lifestyle.

Economic limitations, coupled with legacy security infrastructure and privacy issues, present a huge challenge to the various public safety and security agencies when it comes to effectively tackling crime and responding to threats. Keeping our cities and communities safe involves not only crime prevention and risk mitigation, but also the capability to keep cities resilient to natural disasters and the ability to respond effectively to such incidents.

Therefore, a coordinated approach to combining technologies, operations and collaboration, unique to each individual city, is required to establish an effective framework for tackling crime and security threats. Elsewhere, encouraging examples of crime prevention have emerged: the establishment of public-private partnerships to mobilise resources from government, the private sector and private citizens in shifting the focus from policing to a broader community response. Strategies have included improved social services and the redevelopment of public spaces.

Some of the key challenges that law enforcement agencies face today include:

• Disparate systems, and sometimes manual systems, impeding data sharing.

• No effective way to measure and manage all operational aspects including security, maintenance, OHS, surveillance, manpower, SLAs, assets (live and static), time and attendance, site and shift rosters.

• No integrated situational awareness of where and what is happening at any given time.

• Lack of visibility or resource allocation to manage and gain insight into which resources are where at any point.

• Presence of huge legacy infrastructures which present integration and obsolescence management challenges.

• Lack of modern and advanced sensors to provide surveillance inputs.

• Lack of analytical capability to deal with big data and predict and plan for unknown events.

• The lack of platforms that connect citizens to law enforcement agencies.

As we focus in on how digital change and the pace of change can empower safety and emergency officials to be safer and more effective in their jobs, the lessons learnt from other industries and solutions can be applied and tailored for government. Problems are not solved through new information, rather by filtering information we already have. We must team with local communities, local government officials and stakeholders in the private sector to connect to each other through digital means, allowing the stakeholders and agencies to share information, analyse structured and unstructured data and respond and act quicker.

We also see citizens being more digitally sophisticated and demanding higher levels of safety and security services. While technology will never replace the face-to-face interactions completely, it is certainly enabling improved safer cities. But municipalities can’t do it alone.

Sukema has worked hard over the past eight years and has successfully developed a fully-integrated suite of software products on a single centralised open platform known as Chase. Our mission is to provide smarter public safety, security and emergency management solutions that assess and mitigate risks, predict, detect, plan and prevent disasters, improve response times and drive collaboration across multiple agencies”.

Sukema is building solutions that allow city officials to manage their operations more efficiently, respond swiftly to emergencies, prevent crime, and address risks. Most local authorities cannot afford the type of integrated solutions being implemented by large metros whose budgets allow for large SAP-type systems, yet the same requirements exist around safety and security in a local authority as they do in metros. We are providing ways to achieve the same results by applying the principles mentioned without the huge financial strain.

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