Sustainability issues vary widely from one city or community to another.  From addressing healthcare problems such as affordable healthcare, COVID-19 pandemic etc.; to education challenges to ensure no one is left behind; to fighting poverty and hunger and eliminating inequalities; to addressing environmental degradation; the list goes on.  Sustainability issues are easy to identify but difficult to address all at the same time for many reasons such as lack of resources and budget, inadequate infrastructure, political dynamics, etc.  Our SMART Framework© advocates looking at these issues holistically while also emphasizing on citizen’s needs and pain points to formulate and implement effective policies, strategies, sequencing and priorities to address these issues.  The strategies and policies will serve as drivers to implement technology solutions for improving the quality of life of citizens in communities.

We realize that Smart Community transformation begins with bridging the digital divide to achieve digital inclusion. Digital inclusion must support citizen mobility to ensure the maximum reach of the government to its citizens. With the tremendous advancements in technologies such as Broadband High-Speed Internet, Cloud Technology and Mobile Technology as well as since most citizens nowadays have mobile devices or smartphones, our SMART Framework© advocates the use of mobile technology to develop a single one-stop mobile app that integrates a myriad of services, information portals, and workflows from the public, private, and academic sectors tailored to meet the needs of citizens. Citizens don’t need to search for websites that have multiple layers of web pages just to find the information or service they need. The service or information could be literally handed to them through the smartphone on a just-in-time basis with the appropriate built-in intelligence. 

We realize that community environment is fluid and dynamic with so may challenges and competing priorities.  Citizens require and demand accurate and disparate community information to go about their daily lives but to obtain this information poses a challenge with many communities.  The most common complaints of citizens, especially the elderly, is the challenge in accessing and navigating through layers of pages within a website just to find the information or service they need. In most cases, after a few minutes of not finding what they need, they give up and do not return to the website.  We recognize these challenge and through our SMART Framework©, we emphasize on Agility to respond quickly to citizen demands where information can be captured or created, normalized and assembled for accuracy, and disseminated to the citizens quickly and efficiently.  We also advocate the use of mobile technology to implement a single one-stop mobile app for the community to serve as an effective tool information dissemination, integrated services, and collaboration between government and citizens.

Resiliency issues, like sustainability issues, varies from one community to another.  Many communities are prone to climate change or natural disasters such as storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes while others are prone to chronic stresses such as high unemployment, inefficient public transportation systems, etc.  Resilient issues are easy to identify but difficult to address all at the same time for many reasons such as lack of resources and budget, inadequate infrastructure, political dynamics, etc.  Our SMART Framework©’s approach to tackling resiliency issues is similar to our approach on sustainability issues, taking a holistic approach with significant emphasis on citizen’s needs and pain points to come up with strategies and policies to implement technology solutions for improving the quality of life of citizens in communities.

Our SMART Framework© puts significant emphasis not only on what technology to use but also on an effective framework on how to drive the technology resources and enablers for digital transformation. A subset of our SMART Framework© is our Policy-People-Process-Technology (3P+T) Framework©.  We view Policy as the "driver" while People-Process-Technology are resource enablers for digital transformation.  Formulation of polices, the "drivers for change" require in depth and holistic understanding of the issues leading to effect policies, strategies, sequencing and priorities for solving the sustainability and resiliency issues set forth within our SMART Framework©.  Our SMART Framework provides a model for ensuring that the technology solutions to be designed, developed and implemented will be in sync with the policies.  Furthermore, we complement technology solutions with effective communication strategies to all community stakeholders to manage expectations and  get buy-in from stakeholders of communities.