Standards and Certification

Without well managed public CityScore or Performance dashboards there is no transparency of the local governance results.

Smart City Monitor introduces unified City Score dashboards solution for each city: from small town to big one. It is novel cost-effective unique and fully customizable to include local KPIs, focus areas and object of special interest. Its availability allows informing the mayor, vice mayors, city managers, utility providers and citizens about the overall health of the City in real time by presenting the sustainability status of each key city process including the whole city, and specific urban developments under the focus, relevant key performance metrics and effective yet simple analytics. 

The availability of CityScore as public evidence information service fosters effective driving force for continuous improvements across the City. Its implementation helps to highlight potential areas for improvement in constituent engagement and basic city services and extend the reach of local governance and engage the citizens.

City Score is the holistic performance dashboard supported by various interactive analytics tools (take a look at the demo online). Its real time engine enables automatic collection of big city data from diverse data sources and its digital transformation into key performance indicators and ongoing sustainability statuses related to each area of city life. It actually allows receiving the answers to the question: “How are you my city?” at any moment of time using a mobile device.   

The City Score implementation can be based on major international standards such as for example ISO 37120 and others, while including many local custom indicators and city infrastructure objects representing local city administration policies and practices (download the presentation here).

The Smart City Monitor supports operatoinal compliance with many standards including as follows:

• ISO 37120:2018 Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life
• ISO/TR 37150:2014 Smart community infrastructures -- Review of existing activities relevant to metrics
• ISO 37151:2015 Smart community infrastructures -- Principles and requirements for performance metrics
• ISO/TR 37152:2016 Smart community infrastructures -- Common framework for development and operation
• ISO 18091:2014 Quality management systems — Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:2008 in local government 
• ITU-T SG5 FG-SSC: Focus group on smart sustainable cities 
• IEC/SEG 1: Systems Evaluation Group on Smart Cities (here)
• CEN-CENELEC-ETSI SSCC-CG: Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities Coordination Group
• CITYKEYS 
• ISO 55000 and 55001:2014 Asset management -- Overview, principles and terminology
• ISO 9000 and ISO 9001 Quality Management
• ISO 14000 Environmental management
• ISO 19011 Management systems auditing
• ISO 26000 Social Responsibilities for Sustainable Development
• ISO 31000 Risk management
• ISO 50001 Energy management

The Smart City Monitor team actively participated and contributed to the development of new standards, e.g. in the Focus Group “Data Processing Management for IoT and Smart Cities and Communities” (FG-DPM IoT and SCC) in International Telecommunication Union, Geneva. 

International standard ISO 37120 “Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life” released in 2014 and revised in 2018, became the first successful effort of experts to create integrated view for performance analysis of urban areas. The standard provides uniform definitions of what is measured and how it should be done and introduced common basis for reporting, comparison and benchmarking.

“International Standard ISO 37120:2018 Establishes a set of standardized Core, Supporting and Profile indicators that provide a uniform approach to what is measured, and how that measurement is to be undertaken ( http://iso.org  )”

The ISO 37120 defines 21 city themes of City Services and Quality of Life including as follows:

1. Economy
2. Education
3. Energy
4. Environment and climate change
5. Finance
6. Fire and Emergency Response
7. Governance
8. Health
9. Housing
10. Population and social conditions
11. Recreation
12. Safety
13. Solid Waste
14. Sport and culture
15. Telecommunications
16. Urban Planning
17. Transportation
18. Urban/local agriculture and food security
19. Urban planning
20. Wastewater
21. Water

There are Core and Supporting and Profile Indicators as well as relevant Data Sources.  

ISO requires third party verification of data sources and quality for ISO standard certification.

Importance of Standard 

The ISO 37120 standard is important as it

• Steers and guides sustainability, effective governance and delivery of services
• Allows unified way of accessing city’s performance of services, infrastructure, institutions (especially outsourced) for all cities including small towns and big cities,
• Improves city operations presenting its aggregated results
• Increases transparency and accountability 
• Leverages project funding, prioritizing city budgets for assessing quality of life,
• Introduces transparency and open data fostering public/private infrastructure developments and investment attractiveness
• Facilitates learning and use of methodology for continuous improvement and evidence based assessment 
• Makes possible various benchmarking options, goals definition and comparative analysis in strategies and policies development and planning
• Assists in building core knowledge for city decision-making and enabling comparative insight and global benchmarking
• Supports new Open Data and new application development

Using the standard to make the digital twin running in real time

Smart City Monitor team used the ISO 37120 standard for the implementation of the sample digital twin model of a city as Big Urban System of Systems to run in cloud as transformation engine using the city open data set required by the standard. The sample data set is presented in 16 spreadsheet files that have simple formats and are easy to understand and update monthly.

Running at Smart City Monitor engine, the sample ISO 37120 digital twin model automatically imports local city data from these spreadsheets and transforms it into object standard themes and KPIs presented at online ISO 31720 Monitoring Dashboard and interactive reports about each theme and indicator. The rich analytics empowers the city administrations with effective tools for accelerated cost-effective implementation of their Smart City projects that lead to compliance with the ISO 37120 Standard and the certification. Being open and customisable, the ISO 37120 urban model can be further upgraded incorporating real city infrastructure objects and diverse linkages to all optional data sources including IoT, sensors, automated systems, databases and mobile apps.

The sample urban model by ISO 37120 runs immediately after the setting of Smart City Monitor engine using its sample data representing a city with ~ 60,000 population. The data in the 16 spreadsheet files can be easily replaced with the local city data and put to the different locations that are convenient for the local city data providers (e.g. Dropbox, Google docs, SCM engine, etc). When updated the data is automatically collected by the Smart City Monitor engine which calculates all KPIs and object sustainability statuses and updates stakeholders dashboards, reports and mobile apps proving full transparency of the city results in real time and presenting actual city performance accordingly to the ISO 37120 standard requirements.  

The running digital twin model by ISO 37120 is open and allows experimenting by adding various city infrastructure objects (districts, buildings, streets, resource and service providers and consumers, etc), and necessary custom indicators and linkages with local data sources (sensors, smart meters, IoT, city automated information systems) and enabling its monitoring and analytics and evaluation of sustainability in real time. 

The Smart City Monitor team is ready to support to city administration employees and utility providers and other customers and local partners in the quick and cost effective technology implementation, its learning, prototyping and training.

Smart City Monitor 37120 dashboard in real time

• Is principally new powerful online tool assisting city administrations and utility providers in smart sustainable governance with practical conformity to ISO 37120 and other standards
• Presents achievements that are transparent and verifiable online for all stakeholders supporting cost effective continuous compliance auditing
• Fosters community achievements and continuous improvements in real time
• Provides effective smart governance tools assisting in monitoring daily life operations and strongly improving productivity of employees

• Supports certification needs of city administrations and elections proving the trustful evidence
• Simplifies and decreases the certification costs of compliance with the ISO 37120 and other standards while increasing its practical value for cities as digital transformation tool.

Additional links

ISO 37120 Certification program by Association for Sustainable Innovative Development in Economics, Environment and Society (ASIDEES)

Download the presentation Assisting Smart Cities and Communities in ISO 37120 Certification and Smart Sustainable Governance

Our company supports novel approach and practical innvatoin solution toward cities certification that

- Presents city indicators in full compliance with ISO 37120:2018 standard “Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life” and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

- Is open for quick adding any necessary local custom indicators

- Provides real time performance monitoring dashboards online (assess defined by local administration)

- Supports additional tools evidence analytics and benchmarking

- Augments city website presenting local governance achievements

- Certifies continuous compliance with ISO 37120 and SDGs and local urban development goals as Living Standards

City departments and other providers of urban data required by ISO 37120 can store relevant spreadsheets in shared folders (Dropbox, Google docs, own city server, etc) that are automatically accessed by Smart City Monitor software in their city collecting data daily or weekly or monthly. The scalable urban model is open for further expansion and addition of KPIs to represent necessary urban infrastructure.

Unique benefits for administrations and citizens of cities:

Forward-looking city councils and municipalities can obtain now unique novel cutting-edge opportunity for certification of their Cities in compliance with ISO 37120 and its continuous visibility as online services for their communities and internationally. The online certification solution is open to the accommodation of newly developed standards such as ISO 37122, ISO 37123 and others as well as local indicators for smart governance and management.

The offer supports any city and community worldwide including small and middle size cities that are interested in transparency of governance and presentation of evidence of the local governance achievements. The solution facilitates continuous automatic auditing of compliance with international standards and local management practices. 

The key difference and benefits for the communities

The common ISO 37120 certification for a city results in the official papers that provide single time assessment and audit of the city performance results. In the time of accelerating urban dynamics and change it verifies the past.

With Smart City Monitor public dashboards presenting actual city performance in real time online the certification is continuous presenting ongoing results in transparent way. Relevant analytics support quick and easy benchmarking and various evidence analytics. The open data is provided and updated by relevant trained municipality departments and city institutions accordingly to the requirements of international standard.  It is immediately transformed into public information services and analytics by Smart City Monitor and realising continuous automatic auditing.

As result, the city certification brings into community the visibility of “Living Standards of Quality of Life” presenting the real time evidence of the local governance achievements beside relevant official papers. 

Further details are availabe at our partner site ASIDEES.ORG 

Download the presentation Assisting Smart Cities and Communities in ISO 37120 Certification and Smart Sustainable Governance

Association for Sustainable Innovative Development in Economics, Environment and Society (ASIDEES) has designed and implements a Joint Smart City Certification programme to assist cities, municipalities, city advisors and utility providers in preparing the city certification for compliance with ISO 37120:2018 "Sustainable development of communities -- Indicators for city services and quality of life". The certification programme supports and improves and promotes new styles of smart city management and work in a data-rich digital transformation environment. The program is implemented in collaboration with national consulting and standartdsation partners (Download the presentation Assisting Smart Cities and Communities in ISO 37120 Certification and Smart Sustainable Governance).  

City stakeholders such as city authorities, municipalities, utility providers and businesses as well as citizens have to deal with increasing complexity of cities. Their cities as Big System of Systems are in accelerated change and complexity. There are diverse criteria of quality of life and understandings of the urban sustainability. The management and monitoring of such systems require access to a massive number of data sources such as sensor networks, IoT, various automated and control and information systems, databases and smart everything. The enabling technology shall support and improve citizens living environment and let administrations to cope with these issues providing a simple holistic and transparent vision of city processes in real time.
    
The Smart City Certification program is directly linked to the international standardisation processes taking place in European Union and all over the world. The ISO 37120 provides a clear definition of the urban model structure, set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and data sources required for evaluation of the quality of life in urban communities. The program is based on the recent success of 'Smart Urbana' project coordinated by ASIDEES and implemented in five European cities. Smart Urbana demonstrated the effective novel solution for a holistic view of the sustainability status of the city as well as for each its service areas separately accordingly to the international standard ISO 37120. The solution supports easy management and monitoring of the whole city and various focused areas of services, calculating its key performance indicators, statuses in real time, and answering the question “How are you, my city?” in any necessary detail.