MCSI StateSec Catrina: Not all cities are prepared to become smart

Not all cities are prepared to become smart and there are four things that we need before seeing a digital transformation: human resources, procedures, policies and platforms, secretary of state with the Ministry for Communications and Information Society (MCSI) Manuela Catrina said at the expo-conference "Sustainable intelligent communities. Current challenges and outlook." 

"We need a national strategy to prepare for the smart city concept, as the digital instruments are one of the solutions at hand to modernize Romania, our cities and the place we live in. In order to see a digital transformation happening, we need four things: human resources, policies and platforms. Unfortunately, many times, we are starting with the platform and only eventually we are trying to identify the human resources, while leaving the procedures and policies last. But things cannot work like this. This is a difficult process, especially as the new technologies represint a continuous transformation. But when a community faces so many problems that need urgent solving, it is hard to go back every time to try to modernize and transform. Definitely, certain things need to get standardizes, but we are talking about a standard that develops. Which is why I will say something that it's not necessarily pleasant: not all cities are prepared to become smart. There are certain international standards that measure the number of unemployed per hundred inhabitants, the number of inhabitants holding university degrees. We have a diversity of things that we need to take care first, a lot of aspects that need to be dealt with, and it's not just about connectivity," said Catrina. 

According to her, a smart city is one that has leaders with vision and intelligent inhabitants. 

"The National Strategy for Smart City is not ready yet, but we discovered it has so many components ... There are systems that already exist and we must work with them and we need to figure out how to do it, so that we won't leave a heavy inheritance to our successors. We have the shortcuts, like: "We have an old application, let's put it on the mobile phone." I strongly believe that a smart city is a city that has leaders with vision and intelligent leaders, but also intelligent citizens. We all saw a lot of strategies. The smart city strategy will have the power that we give it, while finding in it the resources to modernize our communities. The strategy passes the Government in collaboration with the other institutions, the same as the 5G strategy. We must all agree on what we put in it, so that all that we put in there to be implemented later. As a ministry, we are very much interested in fields like cyber security, resilience, inter-operability, data protection. I am positive that other colleagues from other fields of activity are also interested in certain aspects included in this strategy," said the MCSI secretary general. 

A new edition of the annual expo/conference Smart Cities in Romania takes places on Tuesday in Bucharest, under the title: "Sustainable intelligent communities. Current challenges and outlook." 

The event aims to promote various concepts and technologies, but especially the exchange of information and knowledge gathered in the most recent projects.