Virtual City Implementation Strategy

Implementation process of Safa Virtual City, as a solution for urban planning and management and a delivery channel for urban services, requires efforts that are defined as practical phases, to take any urban services structure from any existing situation to a stable IT state, ready for full integration of all urban services.

Safa Virtual City responds to requirements of three levels of urban information pyramid and targets all audiences in these three levels. It facilitates reporting activities in different parts of the city government, regarding urban development. Its purpose is to give services to policy makers, project planners, middle management and executives, as well as citizens.

In this way, all managers will be able to have special reports describing the urban projects and urban services from a special point of view. For finding knowledge about urban services policies, existing projects or projects progress status, each level of management in the pyramid don't need to wait for responses from lower level. They will have what they need directly from the system. The integrated system will act like a complete live body for transmitting policies and projects information from one side, and projects advances and success of policies reports from the other side. It provides a bi-directional path for information stream from top management to executives.

According to our studies, over 80% of all data which is created and maintained in public works relates directly to property information. With gathering all discrete IT systems in all organizations which are responsible for providing urban services to the public we try to reduce duplicated activities for data collection and it will bring 80% reduction in data collection costs in participant organizations. This way, total cost of delivering services in all such organizations will be declined consequently. Furthermore, organizations can focus more on their own special role and responsibility instead of involvement in non-relevant tasks, such as collecting property information. So we will avoid duplication, inconsistency and resource over-usage from one side and reduce cost, increase performance and expect technical quality and service quality growth from the other side.

In order to achieve our objectives, we consider following implementation phases, which will be explained in coming sections.

• Conducting gap analysis on existing IT infrastructure and proposed solution

• Data collection for existing physical and digital files for properties and organizing electronic archives

• Forming data center and preparing the urban base map in municipalities

• Conducting Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and proposing required changes in organizational structure, job descriptions and providing personnel with training courses to work with new systems.

• District by district implementation of the project to form a wide information network to deliver services in a centralized way

• After completion of all services in municipalities we would extend the services to other organizations, and follow the same steps for automating activities and practically connecting their property data to the data center.

• Next step is providing the possibility of integrating private sector services and unification of data exchange formats to shape virtual city.

With this quick review of prerequisites for successful implementation of the system, now we can step ahead and look at phases that we have considered for this step by step implementation of the integrated urban management system. We consider following distinct phases for implantation: