City officials recently held an engaging workshop with experts from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), the University of South Africa (Unisa) and the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to assess the City’s readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The gathering examined factors that may disrupt the City’s ways of doing business – specifically from the perspective of generational gaps, skills mismatch and organisational culture.
The meeting was arranged by the Innovation & Knowledge Management Unit (Group Strategy, Policy Coordination & Relations Department), which collaborated with the Group Human Capital Unit and Smart City Unit under its Thought Leadership programme.
This is a platform upon which the latest thinking insights impacting on the City’s strategic thrusts are debated by CoJ and academic institutions. To this end, this gathering spoke to
two of nine mayoral priorities relating to:
• Creating a culture of enhanced service delivery with pride; and
• Encouraging innovation and efficiency through the Smart City progamme.
Commonly held assumptions about the 4th Industrial Revolution were refuted. Firstly, it is not an imminent phenomenon but is already upon us, the delegates heard. “We have been slow at acknowledging this, hence our measures to respond to it have been inadequate at best,” said Monique Griffith from the Smart City office. “We have been slow to acknowledge this, hence our measures to respond to it have been inadequate at best.
“The challenge of the City is to make this transition as smooth as possible, by renewing fast, and making the turn rapidly to get ahead of this storm,” she added.
Secondly, it should not be interpreted as a threat to replace labour with robotics. It fact, the current crop of employees stand to benefit through up-skilling which comes with career progression. It is their institutional memory that advances the organization in its quest to automate business processes and streamline operations, which will result in cost savings, leapfrogged development, and service delivery efficiencies that can stimulate the creation of new industries.
Thirdly, the transition into a 4th Industrial Revolution era is not being hampered solely by a lack of technological adoption and requisite skills, but by the adaptation of policy to embrace and assimilate what is already existing and available out there. City policies do not yet encourage and embrace the adoption of innovative practices, hence they will need to be reviewed and revised to expedite the transition to a Smart city.
However, all is not lost, the City has already noted that it needs to bolster critical thinking and problem solving skills of its staff: “We need to conduct a futuristic skills needs assessment, whereby we identify what we need in order to close the gaps now,” said Mr. Enoch Mafuye, Deputy Director: Training and Development.
It can also build on low hanging fruits such as addressing silos in how it functions and co-create services with communities. This is the advice from Daniel Irurah, a Wits University Professor in resilient cities: “We are not interoperable…the concept of Living Labs, Future City Labs…those are the concepts in Europe, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, which are now the crucibles and cradles upon which the Smart City reality is being incubated, and I think you should move fairly quickly on that”.
This is the first of more planned engagements which will consider policy and the development of a skills transitioning framework with the universities, and laying the groundwork for the living lab principles to be implemented through ongoing Smart City pilot projects. All present agreed that no city in the world becomes smart without its people becoming smart first.”
