Research

The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance is a 501c3 non-profit organization with the mission of creating technology partnerships that develop and prove next-generation solutions to the challenges shared across Colorado communities. Part of accomplishing this mission is conducting research with Alliance members to understand which problems are in need of solutions and preparing reports of our findings and recommendations for the benefit of the Alliance members.

The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance extensively interviewed 15 Colorado municipalities about Smart City initiatives and related challenges they’re facing. We also collected a spreadsheet of approximately 100 pilot projects – either active or inactive – that each city had engaged. The goal of combining the pilots and conducting these interviews was to collect first-person, in-depth insights into what cities are focused on, how they’re considering addressing their challenges, and what hurdles they face to move these initiatives ahead. This research, and the resulting reports below, have been designed to give the Alliance a comprehensive, data-driven understanding of what the cities have said, and how they might help.

The Alliance will continue research with other member cities and public jurisdictions, in addition to updating our research with cities who’ve already been interviewed over time.

The reports that result from this research are provided to Alliance members in the form of 1) an overall landscape analysis and 2) a topic-specific analysis on the issues that come up most frequently (i.e. mobility, civic engagement, etc).

Current Alliance members can access the research reports here.

If you are interested in becoming an Alliance member, please consider visiting our Membership page.

 

What is Smart Government?

The Internet of Things (IoT), applications and data should not define Smart Cities. The process by which they solve problems should. Smart Cities are innovative problem solvers, collaborative partners, and technology enthusiasts, in that order.

How do governments accomplish this? What internal structures do the smartest communities share?

We work every day with many of the governments leading innovation and smart cities, and we do our best to accelerate, replicate, and scale the best ideas to solve our state’s biggest challenges. In our work, we’ve learned a lot about what smart government looks like and how to build it. In this “Elements of Smart Government” resource, we share the eight threads that tie many of our smart governments together.

 

 

Full Document - Elements of Smart Government