Design

Design your smart place so you are ready to invest in smart technologies and data solutions. Your design should respond to the needs of your community and place.

Listen

Goals of this stage

At the end of this stage, you should be ready to deliver smart solutions in your place.

During this stage you will need to:

bring together existing data relevant to your problem and outcome statements
identify the role for smart technologies in gathering additional data to address your problem and outcome statements
understand available smart solutions
establish your current and future digital connectivity needs
identify the digital infrastructure needed to manage your data
assess costs and benefits
develop a project management plan
develop an asset management plan
establish governance structures for delivery and beyond
develop a benefits realisation plan to support evaluation of your project after delivery.

Continuing to engage your community

Engaging customers and stakeholders during the design stage is essential to helping you understand:

the data that may exist to support your solutions
how well your planned solutions meet stakeholder needs
the level of support you have for new approaches and any stakeholder concerns.

Refer to involving your community for more guidance.

i. Consolidating discovery information

ii. Technology and connectivity

iii. Achieving interoperability

iv. Data storage and management

v. Finding and costing solutions

vi. Asset management planning

vii. Preparing a business case and delivery plan

Checklist

Continue ongoing stakeholder engagement

Continue engaging with customers and stakeholders.
Involve the community to identify solutions, preferences, and concerns, fostering support.

Design all elements of a smart place

Smart places are a complex combination of physical and digital infrastructure. Together they support the generation of data insights.

You will need a plan covering all the relevant components of a smart place. This includes digital connectivity, enabling infrastructure, data management and visualisation platforms, sensors and devices.

Identify the data you need to generate

Find the data already available to help address your problem or outcome statements.
Be discerning about how smart technologies can help address data gaps. Refer to the Data for Places: A practitioner's guide for help.

Define connectivity needs

Understand the digital connectivity you have and the connectivity you will need in the future to support seamless data transmission. This includes power, fibre, 4G/5G, IoT networks, wi-fi, and Bluetooth.

Plan for your digital infrastructure needs

Put a plan in place for the digital infrastructure you may need to deliver your selected solution. Refer to devices and enabling infrastructure.

Plan, store and visualise data appropriately

Establish how you will manage and store your data. Define the visualisations you need to support decision making in your smart place.

Use Standards to achieve interoperability

Design your smart place so that systems speak to each other, and data can be easily shared and ingested.

Research appropriate solutions and engage the market

Explore what other smart solutions have been delivered that could meet your needs.
Engage the market to uncover new potential solutions for your specific problems and opportunities.

Undertake a cost-benefit analysis

Assess costs and benefits associated with the selected solutions, considering long-term sustainability and return on investment.

Establish project delivery plans and governance

Determine the project management approach and establish governance structures for effective delivery and ongoing operations.

Set up a benefits realisation plan

Outline a benefits realisation plan to evaluate the project's success after delivery.

Establish an asset management plan for your smart place

Develop a comprehensive plan for asset management. This should address the deployment and maintenance of smart devices, connectivity points and infrastructure. Refer to asset management planning.