by Shane Henson — June 13, 2011—IBM recently announced its IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, a new solution designed to help cities of all sizes gain a holistic view of information across city departments and agencies. The Intelligent Operations Center combines patented analytics technologies, created by IBM Research in collaboration with cities around the world, as well as leading-edge technologies acquired in recent acquisitions. It is also designed to run on IBM workload-optimized systems.
IBM says its solution will allow cities to use information and analytics to make smarter and more timely decisions, helping local leaders manage a spectrum of events, both planned and unplanned, such as deploying water maintenance crews to repair pumps before they break, alerting fire crews to broken fire hydrants at an emergency scene, or anticipating traffic congestion and preparing redirection scenarios.
According to IBM, through a unified operations center, cities will be able to:
- Accurately gather, analyze and act on information about city systems and services, including public safety, transportation, water, buildings, social services and agencies.
- Analyze real-time information to better model and anticipate problems to minimize the impact of disruptions to citizens.
- Integrate real-time information from across multiple city systems to enable collaborative decision making for rapid response to events and incidents.
- Analyze real-time information to better model and anticipate problems to minimize the impact of disruptions to citizens.
