Smart cities generate significant amounts of data every minute, and the frequency and complexity of this information naturally creates a challenge with respect to how policymakers can best share and integrate their work. Different stakeholders will often have varied protocols and technologies for how they collect and manage information, which makes the coordination of data between departments especially challenging.

Establishing harmonised standards, particularly within government, can help tackle such issues of uncoordinated data management. Standardising data means that each department collects information in a logical and consistent way that is recognisable to and compatible with all potential users. Such actions help to ensure the quality and consistency of information collected, and also help to maximise the potential value of data as a policy tool.

By ensuring harmonised standards, governments facilitate the seamless exchange and communication of information, both from public to private sector, as well as between governmental agencies at different levels, national to local or between municipalities. In turn, this creates multiple benefits, such as lowering the requirements for manipulating and converting data to a usable format, limiting the potential risks of different agencies duplicating data efforts (if government departments are fragmented with insufficient communication), and simplifying overall data exchange to have broader usability and faster adoption between departments.

Policymakers should therefore pay close attention to the interoperability of data as such issues are a critical feature of how data should be collected, shared and used to shape overall policy choices. One example is to ensure that all data is adequately digitised, preferably in a numeric form, such that they can be easily used and analysed. Many municipalities across the developing world operate key municipal data such as cadastral systems in paper-based form, creating a huge challenge for sharing, analysis, searching records, and a whole host of other important issues, until such records are digitised.

City governments and departments play an essential role in ensuring the interoperability of all types of data collected, both pre-existing and new. By storing data in machine-readable formats and adhering to open standards, city agencies can successfully promote interoperability and openness.

Take Taipei, for example.[i] In the early 2010s the city government was struggling to manage its parking system, as private spaces were not consistently recorded as public parking areas. To address the issue, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications issued a statute in 2015 for an Advanced Traveller Information System (ATIS), which harmonised both public and private parking information systems. The new Taipei Parking Information System has been functioning smoothly ever since, demonstrating how a set of common communication protocols for data formatting and integration can help to improve asset management and policy decision-making.

The harmonisation of data standards usually occurs early in the data lifecycle, often after a city strategy is defined, and before new data collection phases. Specific activities are usually coordinated by a government steering committee and should follow national or global standards. For instance, if a city aims to solve the problem of traffic congestion, the first step is to define action items, such as finding out how bad congestion is on the city’s busiest road sections and planning potential interventions accordingly. The city can then identify where to deploy sensors most effectively, either through a feasibility assessment or in-house research based on pre-existing data, and see what information needs to be collected for further analysis. Data interoperability and standards are critical, as they define the data’s format, rules and specifications – such as information on car type, size, speed and transmission frequency. Having clear data standards in place can also address legal concerns as to what kind of information can be collected, shared and used. These institutional frameworks should be followed at each phase of the data lifecycle.

The private sector can support governments in the design and implementation of standardised digital communications infrastructure in a number of ways. Notably, providers of technology solutions can supply governments with essential services such as office software for managing, analysing and reporting on data. Companies such as SAS and UiPath are leading examples in this space, with the latter pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to automate and streamline office-related tasks such as data collection and cleaning for interoperability.

Governments should also consider what information the general public and private sector might need access to, if they were to design accessible and open access data platforms. In this way, it is critical to have open dialogue with the private sector to focus efforts on seamlessly exchanging the information that can provide most value.