Digital technology is transforming our society, institutions, and businesses at an ever-increasing pace. Services can be re-imagined and transformed through use of these digital technologies and the data they provide but a key part is to first understand the Digital Architecture that underpins the organisation.
What is a Digital Architecture?
A Digital Architecture is a framework that captures information across all levels of the organisation and forms the foundation of an information ecosystem across the city covering customers, partners, and employees. Often services are built from smaller constituent services and data from other sources, as such, there is an increasing need to bring together existing services and consolidate data into new digital service models for the city. As a result, the information, systems, and technologies used often cut across applications and service boundaries which is why a single Digital Architecture is vital to a successful and consistent smart city implementation.
Example: Sunderland City Council
After being crowned smart city of the year in 2020, it’s no secret that Sunderland City Council have an ambitious vision for the city that encompasses the delivery of a wide range of digital infrastructure projects that will provide the platform to transform services and dramatically enhance citizens lives.
Perform Green have been supporting Sunderland City Council’s smart city ambitions since 2019. One of the main areas of focus has been ensuring that future investments within the smart city programme don’t reinforce existing departmental silos or service boundaries and lock in existing islands of excellence. As a result, we were commissioned to build a Digital Architecture framework that would enable the council to take full advantage of the features and benefits of the emerging 5G and LPWAN solutions, automate and create responsive services and connect everything necessary to enhance service delivery and the wellbeing of citizens and visitors to Sunderland.
Defining a Digital Architecture
The Digital Architecture models the city through a set of layers into which objects are defined. There are many ways to define these layers, depending on which standards are followed, and each organisation will require a unique approach. We researched the ways in which standards bodies and other cities describe city digital architectures, and found there were 6 layers that are consistently used:
Relationships between these layers can then be explored to tell the story of how current services work, and how future services could be designed with the people in the city at their heart. The architecture is also a tool for exploring the application/technology portfolio, identifying overlaps and gaps, and exploring the use of commodity components by feeding approaches such as Wardley Mapping. Organisations can then use the Digital Architecture in several ways, bottom up (for an individual service or project) or top down (to explore a portfolio of digital assets).
Why create a Digital Architecture?
Our engagement with Sunderland also highlighted the utility of the Digital Architecture as a tool to explore information governance and security topics. As the underlying complexity of services can be quickly exposed by running them through this architecture.
How to create a Digital Architecture?
To create a meaningful Digital Architecture, a number of elements need to be delivered.
Documentation review
An in-depth documentation review needs to be completed to understand the current infrastructure and technology in place and the standards and processes that are followed within the organisation, this ensures that the architecture that is delivered is accurate and can be easily adopted.
Smart City standards review
Alongside the documentation review, complete a review of the standards landscapes to consider how these standards could contribute to the Digital Architecture. Standards should be evaluated to define how they apply to the main layers of the Digital Architecture (People, Services, Applications, Data, Technology, Objects) or to more general product/project delivery (project start-up, business case, delivery, operation). An assessment can then be made as to what degree alignment with specific standards should be pursued.
When building the architecture for Sunderland City Council the Perform Green team reviewed the standards landscape, to find the best examples that would make the work easier for Sunderland.
The following types of standards were explored:
- Smart City standards from major standards bodies such as BSI, ISO, IEC and ITU.
- Local standards set by specific cities and nations.
- IoT standards set by technology standards bodies and industry groups.
- General ICT and telecoms standards that are applicable to anticipated technical solutions.
- UK public sector standards for digital services.
Stakeholder Engagement
The next critical area of focus is to ensure engagement at all levels of the organisation. Stakeholder workshops and interviews should be held with individuals from the relevant service, digital and ICT teams, to understand the current technology and infrastructure in place, and develop the real-world use cases of how these solutions are delivered.
Build underlying Digital principles
If principles around digital aren’t already in place, these should be defined whilst developing the Digital Architecture. These provide a common set of ideals for all staff within the organisation to stand behind. Often falling under themes such as ‘Data’, ‘Security’. ‘Project’ and ‘Service’.
Create a standards toolkit
Following the standards review and further engagement within the organisation, a toolkit approach should be taken to ensure only the most relevant aspects of the standards are selected to inform the Digital Architecture.
Build out the architectural layers
Through the information gained within the stakeholder engagement sessions and documentation review, the layers within the Digital Architecture should be populated to reflect the current makeup of the organisation.
Test relevant use cases
Once the initial Digital Architecture has been created it is important to identify a representative set of use cases that can be passed through the model to identify any gaps that aren’t covered by the layers and to illustrate to service areas how the Digital Architecture can be used as a practical framework for describing a service.
The Result
Perform Green’s engagement with Sunderland City Council culminated in a final workshop with the stakeholders involved in the city architecture development. As a result of adopting a rigorous delivery approach the Digital Architecture has been very well received, with Dave Young, the lead for their IoT enabled assistive care solution, SHIELA, praising its utility.
“I wish this had been available eighteen months ago, it would have saved folks in our IOT project a whole lot of time and pain. It also provides assurance to all concerned that what we procure in this field will be fit for purpose and has met a set of standards and is interoperable to connect data. Great stuff!”
Dave Young, Deputy Business Development Manager, Sunderland City Council
For more information about building a Digital Architecture and enquiries please contact us for an exploratory conversation.