Becoming a Smart City

The Norwegian municipality of Bodø has the ambition to become one of Norway's first Smart Cities. To reach this goal, they needed to identify their innovation needs and find the right suppliers to help build their Smart IT architecture. EGGS has worked together with Bodø municipality to help them in this process.

A tech-enabled, human-centred vision

In 2018, Bodø Kommune received funding from Innovation Norway for an innovation partnership to develop smart IT architecture as a basis for the envisioned Smart City Bodø. In this, EGGS has helped ensure that the end-users – the citizens of Bodø, the industry and public stakeholders - and their needs will remain the focus.

A critical component is to act as interpreter and interface between the tech needs of the project, the human needs, and how this aligns with the remaining stakeholders. The creative tech team of EGGS has worked as a form of glue between the technical IT side of the project, and the human-centred and visual communication -service design side.

The potential users of a smart city are many. To scope a starting point, we did insight work with the local fire brigade (Salten Brann) and representatives from Bodø Kommune itself. In the picture, we see a LEGO Serious Play workshop with the aim to identify Salten Brann's and stakeholders in Bodo Kommune’s needs.

Designing the project

As in many innovation projects, it wasn't entirely clear what Bodø Kommune's needs were when starting. Hence, we focused on identifying these needs, scoping, and mapping them out, along with the stakeholders involved. Through workshops, visualisations, and interviews, we could together paint a clearer picture of the project itself. Moreover, to succeed with a complex project that depends on many different stakeholders, we helped Bodø develop a «common language» where the various stakeholders can understand and help each other reach a common goal.

Zeroing in on the needs

Our primary mission in this part of Bodø's journey towards becoming a Smart City is to help them find the best, most suitable suppliers for developing a smart IT- architecture. The goal is to build a smart architecture that is flexible and secure for any potential future. It needs to communicate with the systems they already are using, be secure enough to store data, and open possibilities for new business models. In other words, we need to be not only user-centred but also data centred.

To succeed with this, we dug deeper into the project and its specific needs through interviews and quantitative and tech research. Together, we created nuanced and well-underbuilt need specification documents for potential suppliers, allowing Bodø to reach out to the market with clearly defined future needs and possibilities.

When all insight work was done, the «dot-connecting» started. This is where we put all the pieces together and identify the main findings, such as future needs and opportunities. In this mega-map, we visualized the results in a way that would be easy to understand without missing any information.

We identified that the maturity for technology for the different stakeholders in Bodo Kommune was varying. Hence, creating a visual library to communicate around technology became an essential part of the delivery. Some of the illustrations are already being used on the municipality's website.

Making suppliers see the win-win

As the transformation and development of a smart city is a profoundly complex project, it requires the participation of many different types of stakeholders with expert knowledge. In this, our biggest challenge was to facilitate the dialogue between Bodø and the potential suppliers. We needed to make sure the potential suppliers understood Bodø's needs and that they could contribute with their reflections on the probability of proposed innovation and processes. Also, we needed to encourage cooperation between suppliers. EGGS contributed to this by designing the dialogue meeting with the suppliers, where we delivered the following: