Last month, Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure unveiled its Safe City Framework during the annual Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. I can’t think of a better city for us to launch this approach to delivering solutions with potential that has no limits.
In 2016, the City of Barcelona became one of Hexagon’s Shaping Smart Change Honorees for implementing a multi-agency emergency management platform supported by our Intergraph Computer-Aided Dispatch system and mobile technologies. By modernizing its services with integrated solutions and advanced capabilities, city officials have made coordinating incident management between fire, police, and external agencies easier; they’ve improved response times and accuracy; and, ultimately, they’ve started creating a safer city for the citizens of Barcelona.
The promise of potential is one of advancement, becoming the best possible version in the future. The strategic and technical promise of our Safe Cities Framework is no different. By enabling city governments and agencies to migrate to an enterprise information architecture that is interoperable, modular, scalable, and sustainable, we help address challenges like growing service demand, the increasing complexity of mission scope, and changing public opinions and expectations. We advance a city’s ability to become more resilient by connecting critical systems, enhancing operations, increasing collaboration among agencies, and expanding stakeholder engagement.
The City of Barcelona is not alone in this safe city transformation. As Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s President, I have an opportunity to talk to our customers often. Many of them have the same goals and desires. Not only do they want to protect people and property; they also want to protect their city’s economy, its environment, and the public’s perception that their city is a safe place to live, work, and visit. They want their city to grow, prosper, and improve the quality of life for people already living there, as well as for anyone migrating there. And many of them know that technology is critical to realizing any of these things.
With our Safe City Framework, city governments and agencies have integrated solutions and advanced capabilities at their fingertips, enhancing what they’ve done in the past while delivering new capabilities and services that will move them forward into the future. The promise and shape of potential for cities starts with ensuring safety. After that, everything else falls into place.
