Winning the “War for Talent” for our Smart Cities
Smart cities are complex ecosystems that use information and communication technologies to help their citizens and organisations deal with the challenges of urbanisation, safety, greening, resilience, and sustainability. Building smart cities is a process of a long and laborious transformation. But this should not be viewed only as a technical challenge – but rather as a movement that aims to create citizen-centred ecosystems that improve people’s quality of life and stimulate economic growth.
Smart city ecosystems truly include everybody – comprising of people, organisations, and businesses, policies, technologies, legislation, and processes that are integrated and go hand in hand with one another to achieve the desired outcomes. Although we have been working on the development of these smart new ecosystems for several years now, it is quite recently that we discovered that the people factor was not considered to a sufficient extent.
In order to bridge these knowledge gaps, the University of Thessaly and most specifically the Research Laboratory for “Management, Digital and Educational skills” (MANDEIS lab) of Business Administration department has developed a portfolio of programmes for smart cities’ officers.
More specifically, in the context of the SmartDevOps project (https://smartdevops.eu) we developed three new smart city job profiles for smart city professionals, namely: Smart City Planner, Smart City IT Manager, and Smart City IT Officer. The project also developed the first version of the Smart Cities Body of Knowledge (SCBoK), a freely downloadable resource. It is an attempt to systematically approach the topic of the competences required by smart cities. Furthermore, it offers curricula that can be used to build this required knowledge coherently and systematically.
Currently, the same lab is developing two new job profiles related to smart cities: resilient smart cities officer and open data smart cities officer. Smart City Resilience Officer (SCRO) is an innovative position in a smart city acting as the city’s central person for planning and building smart city’s resilience capacity (https://crisisproject.eu/).
Similarly, open data officer is another new job profile that we expect to be of significant importance within our smart cities. According to Open Data Institute manifest (https://theodi.org/about-the-odi/our-vision-and-manifesto/our-manifesto/) “Everyone must have the opportunity to understand how data can be and is being used. We need data literacy for all, data science skills, and experience using data to help solve problems.” This is a new capability that smart cities’ officials should develop and it is referred to as ‘data capacity’ or as ‘data literacy’. Therefore, an Open Data City Officer (OpenDCO) is an innovative position in a smart city acting as the city’s central person for planning and building a smart city’s capacity on open data.
Smart city ecosystems are complex, self-organising, and dynamic systems – and they are constantly evolving. As such, employee development and skills for smart cities have to receive sufficient attention and be approached systematically.
Keywords: smart cities, occupational profiles, smart cities body of knowledge