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Smart Community Strategic Plan - Smart CoM

Council endorsed the Smart Community Strategic Plan - Smart CoM on 25 August 2020. Smart CoM sets the agenda and strategic approach for advancing innovation within our City over the next three years.

At the City of Marion (CoM), our Innovative Community Vision is: “By 2040 our city will be a leader in embracing and developing new ideas and technology to create a vibrant community with opportunities for all.”

The City of Marion acknowledges the social, economic and environmental implications of technology, and how they are and will continue to shape our community.

The Smart CoM Strategic Plan outlines a set of initiatives, aligned to the 3 key goals, and foundational principles aimed to accelerate transformation to achieve our Innovative Community Vision.

Our strategic context

  • Projected population growth of 15 per cent over the next 15 years
  • An aging population and increased diversity within the community
  • Static job growth and decline within large historic sectors e.g. retail
  • Community expectations increasing, requiring more services for lower rates
  • Importance of climate change and the urgent response required to address the impact of human activity to protect our environment
  • Need to be adaptive, well-planned and flexible, empowering smarter, data-driven decisions
  • Technology changing rapidly, requiring a higher level of digital literacy amongst the workforce, high demand across the labour market for these skills

Our Smart Community 

A smart community uses technology and data to drive economic activity, accelerate innovation and better manage energy, resources and services. Most importantly, a smart community is people-focused.

Foundational Principles

People | We have a people-focused approach to being smart. This ensures we remain focused on improving our residents’ and visitors’ quality of life.

Problems | We advance innovation and sustainability with a problem-centred lens, addressing real community issues and opportunities that we see and hear about from our community.

Fast followers | To maximize value for money, where possible and appropriate we will experiment, learn and scale following others who gone before.

Collaborate | We are wise with more minds, through experience, sharing of resources, and funding. We value partnerships with government, businesses, community and researchers to collaboratively solve problems and identify opportunities.

Inclusive | We seek to bridge the digital divide in our community, to provide options and support for interacting with us as an organisation.

Meaningful | With the growing availability of data and information, we will ensure we use this important asset in a meaningful way to improve services and inform decision making.

Privacy, Security and Integrity | Technology offers exciting opportunities to enhance transparency and accountability. Working with experts we will maintain the security and integrity of the information and privacy of our community.

Smart Goals

Smart Community | Our Smart Community is informed and engaged. To ensure our community are at the centre of using technology, digital skills and tools must be accessible to all to progress our six themes of being liveable, connected, engaged, prosperous, innovative and valuing nature.

Smart Places | Smart Places are the neighbourhoods we live, work and learn in, parks and facilities we gather in and places we recreate in. They harness information, technology and infrastructure to support our community to flourish.

Smart Organisations | Being a Smart Organisation ensures we put our customers first. We use technology to create inclusive ways for people to interact with us and continuously look for innovative ways to provide services to our community.

Measuring success

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a global framework to measure our success for our Smart CoM Strategic Plan. Mature Smart Cities are seeing examples of triple bottom line returns contributing to the social economic and environmental wellbeing of communities. Aligning measuring our success to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a triple bottom line approach ensures we remain outcomes focused, and data driven.

A suite of success measures will be progressively introduced and monitored to assess performance and outcomes focused on the smart goals and actions within this Plan.

Triple Bottom Line | Economic | Social | Environmental *definitions from the Smart Cities Council ‘Smart Infrastructure Unlocks Equity and Prosperity for Our Cities and Towns Report’

Economic | Operational efficiencies lower costs for cities, businesses and citizens; cities with a reliable electric grid and state of the art telecommunications and mobility attract business and industry, lower crime rates lower the cost of doing business in a city; cities that promote smart mobility, smart payments, Wi-Fi, etc. appeal to tourists.

Social | Improving the quality of life; lowering the cost of living; conquering the digital divide enabling upward mobility for disadvantaged populations; ensuring safer streets and neighbourhoods; providing greater access to healthcare and education; creating better paying jobs in growth industries; reducing food and water insecurity.

Environmental | Ability to monitor and control energy and water use to encourage conservation; smart devices help ensure cleaner water and air; smart mobility and energy efficient buildings reduce carbon emissions, recycling and upcycling lessen need for landfills; integration of more renewal energy into the energy mix.

Smart CoM Strategic Plan

Smart CoM Action Plan FY2020-21