What should an organization’s digital transformation look like? How do you know if your efforts are making the right impact? And, as AI and technology advances at a dizzying pace, how do you make decisions with foresight?
If you’re asking yourself these questions, you’re not alone.
On our inaugural episode of Connect, you’ll discover why truly meaningful transformation starts with people. Our guest—Digital Transformation Evangelist and former CIO, Mike Grigsby—shares valuable insights through his stories and philosophies on digital transformation that span the layers of an organization and transcend today’s technologies.
We’ll explore how meaningful transformation requires synergy between people, processes and technologies. From a more practical standpoint, Mike draws upon his experience in the public and private sector to share some great advice on navigating organizational obstacles, breaking down silos and leveraging cultural currency.
For more information about Axis Communications, visit us at www.axis.com
Follow us on social media at
Axis Communications - Home | Facebook
What should an organization’s digital transformation look like? How do you know if your efforts are making the right impact? And, as AI and technology advances at a dizzying pace, how do you make decisions with foresight?
If you’re asking yourself these questions, you’re not alone.
On our inaugural episode of Connect, you’ll discover why truly meaningful transformation starts with people. Our guest—Digital Transformation Evangelist and former CIO, Mike Grigsby—shares valuable insights through his stories and philosophies on digital transformation that span the layers of an organization and transcend today’s technologies.
We’ll explore how meaningful transformation requires synergy between people, processes and technologies. From a more practical standpoint, Mike draws upon his experience in the public and private sector to share some great advice on navigating organizational obstacles, breaking down silos and leveraging cultural currency.
For more information about Axis Communications, visit us at www.axis.com
Follow us on social media at
Axis Communications - Home | Facebook
Scott Dunn (00:05):
From AI and deep learning, to cybersecurity and IOT, keeping up with technology can be challenging.
James Marcella (00:14):
Our podcast is not just about helping you keep up, we're inviting you to the precipice of what we now know is possible.
Scott Dunn (00:21):
Join us as we interview industry luminaries and trailblazers to hear how they're leveraging technology, navigating the pitfalls, and predicting the future.
James Marcella (00:32):
Together we'll explore today's most timely topics, combining human imagination and intelligent technologies to discover new solutions.
Scott Dunn (00:43):
I am happy to introduce my co-host, Mr. James Marcella, security expert and industry association leader.
James Marcella (00:52):
And it's a pleasure to introduce Scott Dunn, technology innovator and award-winning speaker.
Scott Dunn (00:58):
And this is Connect, a bimonthly podcast from Access Communications. On today's episode, I'll be talking to Mike Grigsby about balancing security and privacy. Welcome to the podcast, Mike.
Mike Grigsby (01:18):
Scott, thank you for having me.
Scott Dunn (01:20):
Mike, maybe we could start today, just give us a few minutes about your yourself and some of the roles you've had, what you've done.
Mike Grigsby (01:27):
I am a former Director of Innovation and Technology for the city of Sioux Falls in South Dakota. Over the last 10 years, I have had several different CIO positions, all in the public sector. I was the CIO for the Kansas City Missouri Police Department and then the CIO for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, so public safety, transportation, and then most recently in municipal government. Over the last 10 years, not only have I had the great fortune of working from a practitioner standpoint as a CIO and as a senior executive within public sector, but I've also been largely involved in the smart city space. I think one of the other things too, to talk about my background in particular, I definitely have the technical acumen, but over the last probably five or six years, I've really focused in on the people and process side of technology. So paying attention to that, the people and process side, the culture side, that has just as much impact on the success of technology as the technical side to it. So that's where I spend a lot of time right now, helping organizations understand that through digital transformation and how that plays out across their entire organization, not just on a technology side.
Scott Dunn (02:40):
I definitely want to get back to that people and process point, but for the uninitiated and maybe for the semi initiated such as myself, when you use the term smart city you, you've been at this for a while, and even recently I still hear a lot of confusion about, "What is a smart city?" So maybe you could help enlighten me and the audience here a little bit about exactly what you're talking about there.
Mike Grigsby (03:03):
That was a term that came up 2009. The idea behind it was data. How do cities utilize data to make better informed and better timely decisions? So when we think about the data, we already had cities, when I say "We" meaning cities, already had gobs of data. We had filing cabinets full, we had ERP systems full of this, we have utility payment systems. Cities were inundated with lots of data, but the smart city effort really tried to bring all of that data together. How do we make meaningful insights when we're looking at public safety data and parks and recreation data, or public works data and library data, or public health data? How do we get the meaningful insights out of this? And I've always said for a long time that the purpose of data is twofold. One, it's faster pattern recognition, and then two, it's smarter resource allocation. Now that you are aware of and know what's going on, what's your appropriate and corresponding response or action to that?
(04:07):
So you can distill it all the way down to awareness plus action, that's what smart cities are, is that they are becoming faster and better aware of what's going on within their region or their sphere of influence, and then how are they responding to that? And in some cases, and we're seeing this more and more now more recently than say back in 2012, some of those responses can be automated. We're seeing automatic responses either through machine learning, or algorithms, or things along those lines, systems talking to other systems, or there's a checks and balances and it's still requires a human intervention or human confirmation validation on before a response is given. We're going to see that more and more over the years, is where we're starting to see more automated response as we become more familiar and we feel that those systems are safe enough.
Scott Dunn (04:55):
That's really fascinating, and I think today the average person in a, "Smart city" is probably going to feel the impact of two things. One would be connectivity, in that I have easy connectivity, it's public wifi, it gives me connectivity no matter where I might be in a city, and then the other thing I think of is smart traffic. What are some of the things you might notice today or feel today as the average citizen moving through a smart city?
Mike Grigsby (05:26):
I think that's a great question because to the degree and extent that the general public doesn't understand what smart city means and what that impact is for them, what's the direct benefit to them? Cities are going to be challenged. This is tax base, this is funding, this is bonds that people are voting on and so forth, and they're going to be challenged to move these initiatives forward regardless of how great they may be if the general public can't understand a tangible benefit to them. So from that standpoint, I'll use an example of smart lighting. This was one of the earliest pieces that we saw, there was just a tremendous push early on around smart cities through smart lighting. Now for those that may not understand what that means is here here for street lighting was mercury vapor, or sodium vapor halogen lights, and that's how it was powered, incandescent type deal.
(06:20):
But now as LED lights came on, we started being able to do that. Changing out this would give cities a tremendous cost to savings from an operations standpoint. Okay, that's very lucrative and very appealing. The downside is general public did not understand the benefit directly, they did not understand the benefit of going from a sodium vapor to an LED. There was a streetlight in front of my house yesterday, there's a streetlight still in front of my house today, I don't understand what you did. Cities did not do a great job of explaining the why behind this and that this was something that was going to going to implement this or bring about this and so forth, and that this was kind of a growth mindset on this. That challenged the narrative of what smart cities were, and in certain places, citizens absolutely rejected the whole notion of smart cities.
(07:08):
But to your point around smart traffic, smart traffic, helping people move in and through cities is an absolute necessity, especially the larger your metropolitan area is, and having intelligent traffic systems, ITS, having in intelligent traffic systems is part of the solution for that. And most of us are familiar with timing. You pull up or you trigger a sensor in the ground and it recognizes and then it starts a different clock, and now you can move traffic forward. Those are early systems, previous technology. Now it's anticipating, there are systems out there that are anticipating how much traffic is going to become and prioritizing based on thoroughfares. If there's only one or two cars waiting in a cross section and the thoroughfare is incredibly busy, you're going to wait longer on those cross streets than the thorough fare will because you've got to move more traffic. So it's becoming more intelligent based on actual usage, not just a calculation or just a guess, if you will.
(08:12):
In many cases like Access, being able to implement capabilities through video systems, having the video to understand are there pedestrians? Is there something in the crosswalk? What's the load and the effort, and so forth? So those are things that are happening within with intelligent traffic systems. And we're going to see more, the systems are getting smarter, they're getting more efficient, and we're going to see more of that as we go.
Scott Dunn (08:38):
Yeah, that's a really great point. The problem that we've seen is the infrastructure.
Mike Grigsby (08:41):
Yes.
Scott Dunn (08:42):
You had mentioned where you were, you've got this Google fiber laid, and I know in other cities, Verizon has put in fiber, but that's costly. But now we hear about 5G. So is 5G the savior coming to be the easy, cost-effective infrastructure for all of us when we're dealing with a smart city?
Mike Grigsby (09:03):
You have to think about it in terms of capital expenditure and operational expenditure, and there's 1,001 different things to pay attention to. But when you think about putting fiber in the ground, when you're digging something up and you're putting in physical infrastructure, that's going to come out of capital expenditure, and then you're going to have probably a lower operational expense ongoing. Whereas for cities to tap into something like 5G, that is probably going to come at a lower capital expenditure, but a much higher operational expenditure. And the reason I bring those two together like that is that it's a trade off. We haven't found the solution that's low CapEx, low Op Ex, we haven't found that solution yet. You have to pick your poison, so to speak, and I don't mean to sound like there's not a solution for this, but as many, many organizations are dealing with us, they have to find those trade-offs.
(09:50):
You mentioned the word 5G. A lot of times from a consumer perspective, this has been driven as you're going to get faster speeds, faster speeds, faster speeds. And again, from a consumer perspective, that means I will have less interruption while I'm watching a video, or streaming a video, or something along those lines. There are so many benefits beyond just being able to stream video on your mobile phone, but that's been the messaging so far, and from an education and awareness standpoint, that messaging has primarily been driven through a consumer lens, I'll say. But 5G is just a designation, it's the fifth generation of that and it is really talking about bandwidth. It's the amount of data that you're going to be able to push across these connecting points. And there's going to be a 6G, and 7G, and an 8G.
(10:39):
These are just milestones, we haven't arrived anywhere, these are just milestones. The bandwidth is going to get bigger, it's going to get wider, we're going to be able to push more information. That's coming, that's going to be there. There's a very rich experience that's coming just because we're able to push that much more data. So again, the question comes back to not whether 5G is the ending point, but what can and should I be doing with more data, and how is that going to affect my operations? How's that going to affect my efficiency? How's that going to affect my people and customer and citizen engagement and so forth?
Scott Dunn (11:10):
Well, it's interesting because as a consumer, I've been told that 5G can replace my wifi. I don't need wifi anymore, I can just use 5G. Is that something cities would look at and consider? Is that fact or is that fiction?
Mike Grigsby (11:24):
In certain cases you can replace your home wifi with your mobile wifi, but it all comes down to workload. How much are you taxing that stream of connectivity with whatever you're trying to accomplish? If it's just you in your home and you're just watching movies, maybe you can get away with that. If it's you trying to work from home remotely and your kids are trying to go to school remotely, the amount of workload is going to challenge and stress that to a point maybe you can't keep up with it. The technology has done more to push to the edge. The edge technology is really driving things, but there's still going to be a workload coming back across our networks, and that's where it needs to be accounted for. It's not just 5G, it's an amalgamation of all of those and how are you designing things to take advantage of the technologies that are available to you?
Scott Dunn (12:16):
And I can see with all of these sort of choices that need to be made during a project, of all of those infrastructure types of choices and then the application choices, how do you sort through all of that? And it seems to me that most of these projects are taking very long time, that there's a lot of different stakeholders involved, that there's a lot of decision makers involved, and of course, then there's the money to do it all. I see a lot of pilots, don't see a lot of long-term initiatives going on, so how does all that work?
Mike Grigsby (12:47):
Pilot projects are a tremendous resource for cities. This is a low-cost way to get not just a demo of the tool or the technology, but this is a meaningful and strategic way to get things configured the way you would use them. It's a way for you to get it configured the way that you would do it. It's a low investment from a time, because typically pro projects are designed to kick off very quickly, so it's a lower investment of time, lower investment of costs, and the risk factor is much, much lower. This is not a permanent project, we are kicking the tires on this, we have to test, we have to validate, we have to see if this is going to be beneficial. So there's a lot of latitude that's wrapped into this to allow the city to experiment in ways that they might not otherwise.
(13:35):
The challenge for me, and what I have seen in my own experience is that many organizations don't do pilot projects well. They don't think through them holistically, they think too narrowly in the pilot, and because they're not permanent projects, it gets more challenging to dedicate the necessary resources to a good pilot project. And so thinking through how those pilot projects are done is something that I think is absolutely necessary to be more intentional, to be more deliberate about how you are sourcing and/or going into and deploying those pilot projects. That that's a great way to think about it.
Scott Dunn (14:13):
Earlier on, you mentioned people and process, and I want to talk a little bit more about that. When I think about outcomes, so to speak, sort of in terms of do I have a better experience as someone that's visiting the city, do I feel safer in the city? And then if I'm the city itself, I'm probably looking for that because I want people to live there and be happy or come and visit, but also I'm looking for efficiencies, like you mentioned with lighting. LED lighting is much more cost-effective than the old type of lighting. I'm old enough to remember when they got rid of the candles and gas, so that's how old I am, but anyway, outcomes for the people and cost efficiencies for the city, are those the things that drive the ROI?
Mike Grigsby (14:56):
Yes, but not in and of themselves, and I think what is happening more now is that city administrators not just a mayoral level, but your department heads within many cities now are really starting to understand that this is an everybody game, not just a me game. And what I mean by that is I think one of the greatest challenges for cities is we still have a lot of silos for interdependent systems or interdependent departments, and those silos are probably the biggest threat to having a more holistic opportunity. It probably will not take very long for any one of us to think of a time or a use case where let's say the Department of Health was driving on a particular initiative with a particular citizen, only to realize after that has been completed or after that's down the road bit, that there might have been a public safety component to it, there might have been a public works component to that, there might have been something else that could have all come together, and now we're all tackling these at different times with different results when collectively there could have been a better citizen experience and we could have had better operational efficiency.
(16:08):
Over the past 20, 30 years, cities moved at a pace that allowed them to be more analog. We could do these processes, I could pick up the phone, there was somebody that I would talk to, somebody who was an expert and knew all this. Now that citizens are interacting more with cities online than they are in a building, those silos are creating hindrances for operational efficiency, but they're also creating lackluster experiences at the citizen level. If I can contact Amazon and get this kind of experience, why can't I contact my city and get some level of similar experience? So it's not that those are the drivers for ROI, but those are certainly factors that had to be calculated into this. The thing that I would say that's really challenging is we are, we meaning cities, again, we are implementing technology solutions and almost exclusively thinking about the technical side of those solutions. There is a people side to it, there is a process side to it, there is a cultural side to it that has to be factored in and probably has as much, if not more, impact on the overall success of that technology implementation than the technical side of making sure the ones and zeros work together.
(17:25):
So let's take a new ERP system. From that standpoint, did we look at all of the processes that were in place? Are there still legacy processes that are preventing us from doing things? And not to make it even sound even more complex, but we'll dive in to fix a particular problem at an acute point, not realizing that it's a legacy process back down line that's preventing us from even getting a success on that upline. So it's those kinds of things that are more challenging.
Scott Dunn (17:54):
It's really interesting when you mentioned culture. Talk a little bit about that, the culture side of this. What do you mean by culture? How does that affect this city becoming a smart city?
Mike Grigsby (18:04):
Culture, I think the easiest way to wrap around it, because it's kind of a nebulous term. I think the easiest way to understand what culture is it's the shared mindset, and shared assumptions, and shared beliefs within an organization. I remember I was in the military and I went through bootcamp and I got trained to do all kinds of different things in bootcamp, and then when I got to my first duty station, they were like, "Forget all of that stuff that you learned, this is the way you really do the work." That's culture. Policy is one thing, culture and how work actually gets done, that's what your culture supports. And so when you think about culturally within an organization, you have people within organizations, most oftentimes tenured people within organizations who have a ton of what I'll call cultural currency within that organization that they trade on every day.
(18:59):
They may not have a positional title, positional authority, they're not a manager, or VP. Or C-suite, but they have cultural authority that they exercise every day because they've been the expert in the x, y, z system or whatever it is. And so they get to wield that and trade on that cultural currency. Well, when it comes time, and I'll give you a perfect example. So I was with one organization where we were migrating from the mainframe over to a.net platform. That was a tremendous technical upgrade for the organization. It was going to come at a lower cost, there was going to be greater efficiencies, we were going to be able to share data and play well with and integrate more systems and so forth. So it was a tremendous benefit to us, but I was young in my leadership days and I did not factor in all of the people, and process, and culture sides to this.
(19:49):
And what happened was people who had 20 plus years, maybe even 30 plus years as experts in that system began posturing not prevent the project per se, but to say, what does this mean for me? How do I derive value out of this? What is this going to mean for my career? Those are very valid human questions that we have to factor into this to understand how they translate their expertise into the new system. They're there for a reason and we have to continue to do this. So subsequently in future projects, I now spend a lot of time, I'm very intentional and very deliberate about talking about what does this mean for you tomorrow. When we throw the proverbial switch and go live, what are you supposed to be doing. How do you trade? What skills do you have that can translate immediately on day one that we have to lean on and leverage so that this will be a successful project?
(20:43):
And ironically, by spending that upfront time, one, I'm minimizing a lot of the backend thrashing that takes place in most projects. And the last thing I'll say about this is when we talk about culture, a lot of times that becomes a subjective conversation. Is it the book you read versus the book I read? Is it the conference you went to versus the one I went to? Is it how I grew up versus how you? It becomes a very subjective conversation, and that gets everybody stuck. We don't know how to move forward, who's right, who's wrong, and we get hung up on the wrong things. When you think about culture through a lens of return on value, not just return on investment, but return on value, that makes it and kind of constrains it to a very objective conversation and allows people to find very clear points to stand on, very firm ground to stand on and say, because this is going to create more value back to the employees, or to the systems, or to the customers, or to the citizens, because this creates value, this is why this is "right" this is why we're taking this position on it. So culturally, if you don't focus on the value side, it'll be too subjective of a conversation and people will get lost in that.
Scott Dunn (21:52):
That is a really great piece of knowledge to get from this, a great piece of advice to focus on value rather than the ROI, I just think that's brilliant. Thank you, Mike. I'm going to take those to heart. I think they're great and really make a lot of sense, but the culture is very important to recognize when we're dealing with customers or partners that understanding their culture and how to help them move forward, that's good advice to do. So I want to focus on AI for a minute. What kinds of artificial intelligence, or deep learning, or machine learning are sort of getting traction inside the smart city space? Where is the greatest interest when people talk about artificial intelligence, when they're talking about smart cities, what do you see? What do you hear?
Mike Grigsby (22:40):
I'm going to kind of go a level up above the question here and kind of talk about it from a why are we having these questions. When we think about these solutions, when our sales reps, God love them, when our sales reps talk about artificial intelligence, they are forgetting in large part that most people don't understand what that means. They've heard it, they have a Hollywood version of this, they have a Hollywood understanding of this, but for the most part, they don't understand what artificial intelligence is supposed to be accomplishing for them. And it's just a human thing, if we don't know something, we're afraid to show like we're ignorant so we don't ask the question of what does that mean and why is that supposed to be important for me? So subsequently, we have a lot of implementation or a lot of introduction of these kinds of technologies, whether it's machine learning, whether it's in artificial intelligence, whatever the moniker you wrap around it, we have a lot of introduction of this without people really understanding how to strategically leverage the benefits of that to accomplish what they're doing.
(23:43):
And if you take anything away from what I'm saying right now is spend the amount of time to understand what you're trying to accomplish. Don't worry about whether AI's going to get you there, don't worry about whether it's the robots. What is it that you're actually trying to accomplish and why is that meaningful to you? When we're talking about cities, and municipalities in particular, what may be meaningful under this administration may not be what's meaningful under the next administration, and if we don't understand why we are trying to go forward in this, we're going to be really challenged to bring people along with us, we're going to be really challenged to get people to have buy-in, going to be really challenged to have support for what those initiatives are. So I say that and now I'm going to talk about artificial intelligence.
(24:28):
Artificial intelligence is a way, it's a programming mechanism that allows the machine to do learning and to understand and anticipate responses, or triggers, or influencers, or impacts, or things along those lines based on an analysis of a ton of data. Without that data, artificial intelligence is not as intelligent as it could be, so it relies on tons of data to understand this. Most citizens have had experience with artificial intelligence and it's in way of chatbots. I'm now interacting with an organization on a website and I open up a chat. Those first three, five, maybe 10 questions that I get asked, that's not a human being pounding out keys on a keyboard.
Scott Dunn (25:21):
Come on.
Mike Grigsby (25:21):
That is anticipation.
Scott Dunn (25:21):
I don't believe it.
Mike Grigsby (25:22):
They've even injected sound effects now to make it sound like somebody is-
Scott Dunn (25:25):
Like the typing?
Mike Grigsby (25:25):
Typing yes, to which I say, "I already know it's a robot, don't delay the time, just get rid of the sound effects and give me the answer." I digress. But the computer is anticipating where it thinks we're going to go next based on the question that we have, and then based on that response, and then based on that response, it's anticipating it. That's artificial intelligence. It's not thinking and doing this on its own, it's based on all this program. So to unpack that, what does that mean for smart cities? It's primarily going to show up in almost an identical way. It's as citizens are responding to or reacting to inquiries, I need to pay this traffic ticket, or I need to know how to get a building permit, that's where artificial intelligence is going to come up, probably their first interaction with it. This will also show up as we look at cyber responses. So it is impossible to monitor, have a human monitor all of the potential ways that a bad actor can get into a city's network. It employs, it must employ levels of machine learning, levels of artificial intelligence to combat those bad actors.
(26:39):
So again, that's under the hood and most people won't see that, but that's how it's combating all of these attacks and the number of attacks that are happening more frequently on city networks. Some of the questions you might want to think about is what are ways that citizens are going to want to interact with the city today? As we move forward, how are citizens going to want to interact with the city in the future? And I think one of the most crucial questions to ask is when is it most important to have human interaction in an engagement? If my request is how do I pay this bill? I probably don't have to talk to a single human being at all in that transaction, but if I need public safety services, there's probably a point where I'm going to have to have human interaction so that you can understand what my real need is, and I need sentiment, I need empathy, I need those kinds of things when you're responding to my need. Artificial intelligence isn't there yet on that, so cities, organizations should be thinking about what is the most critical point where we have to have human interaction in those equations.
Scott Dunn (27:47):
I've also met some public servants that don't have any empathy either or the sentiment isn't what you want to hear, but that being said, I get your point. A lot of people just want to talk to a human at some point, you get tired of being run around. What other things do you see cities being concerned with today that they're trying to utilize technology to help them solve those problems in a smart city? Are there other implications, other cases that people should be aware of?
Mike Grigsby (28:16):
One of the things that Covid exposed for us was the need and the reality that everything touches everything else. Covid really exposed the need that we have to allow those things to talk to each other, to share with each other, we have to look at this from a bigger picture, and that's where I think a lot of the investment is going to go. Many companies are making moves and making investments to become systems integrators, bringing legacy systems together, bringing legacy systems up, integrating multiple systems, those are the challenges. And when you look at some of the big players in technology, they have built their reputation around almost a single deliverable or a suite of deliverables. They have not built their reputation around integrating that into other systems. They don't play with others, but there hasn't been a driving need for large enterprise technology players to integrate with other systems until here just recently. And so over time, I think over the next three to five years, I think we're going to see a lot more investment, certainly at that enterprise technology level, but maybe even smaller players coming up and saying, "We're going to be the middleware piece, we're going to develop solutions that bring these two systems together or multiple systems together." I think we're going to start to see a lot more of that over the next three to five years.
Scott Dunn (29:38):
Great segue to this next question because I want to say, what's the future predictions in the next 10 years or so? What are we looking at in smart cities? I know we can get crazy and we've all seen movies of 2050, and everyone's got flying cars or whatever, but what do you realistically think in the next 10 years? Are we going to see every city having smart traffic and other smart systems, what do you think, what's on the horizon?
Mike Grigsby (30:08):
Personally, I am very disappointed that we're not in flying cars yet.
Scott Dunn (30:12):
George Jetson had one by now.
Mike Grigsby (30:14):
Yeah, I watched the Jetsons growing up. So I think whatever industry is responsible for that, you guys have dropped the ball. I think one of the first things that we're going to do is we're going to stop calling it smart cities, I think they're just going to become cities again, just like we don't talk about smartphones, they're just our phones. There are devices now. I think one of the things that is already happening, and we'll just start to see the marketing kind of capture this a little bit more, is that we're just orienting ourselves differently to this as the new norm. I still have people, some family members who will remain unnamed, who opine the days of pencil and paper, or going to a payphone, as if that was easier. And anytime you deal with transitions from one thing to the next, you're always going to have this awkward period of it doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel the feel good enough. So I think that is going to be the first thing that happens, we're just going to stop calling them smart cities, and we're just going to talk about the effects of what this is, and digital transformation is one of the things that smart cities has really ushered in and is really driven. We are transforming our organizations digitally, and we're doing that at a faster, more comprehensive footprint than we have done before.
(31:35):
And I think I'll just take a quick pause here and say, when I say digital transformation, that means when something is transformed, it's not going back to what it was. When it's transformed, it's the new thing and it's going to evolve and grow and continue to go from that standpoint. So if anyone who's holding out for us to go back to some perceived easier way of doing it, don't hold out too long because that's not going to happen. I think the other thing too is that, and this is my opinion, this is the book according to Mike, I think there will be a turn to look more at the human element of things. We have done technology for technology's sake for a large number of years, but we haven't really factored that in to how we're implementing things, how we're driving things, how we're consuming things, but I think there is going to be a return, if you will, to bringing the human back to the center of why we're doing these things. That will get factored into a lot more decisions, a lot more initiatives and so forth. We didn't say this at the beginning, but I have said for a long time that the two foundational pillars of a smart city are data and connectivity.
(32:42):
This analogy is getting harder and harder to get people to understand, but I often use the Beverly Hillbillies example, is that if you're Jed Clampett, and you're out hunting rabbit in your back 40 and you strike oil, if you don't have a way to transport your oil, and you don't have a way to refine your oil, all you have is just basically a black puddle. And it's the same thing, if you don't have a way to transport your data, you don't have a way to secure it, you don't have a way to get it somewhere, and you don't have a way to refine the data, how do you turn that data into meaningful insights? Then you basically just have a puddle of data that is not really helping the larger aspect of this. So that ability for data and that ability for connectivity are two foundational pillars for every smart city initiative. And again, I think we're going to stop calling them smart cities and start calling them cities again and we're going to wrap around this data and connectivity piece.
Scott Dunn (33:33):
Well, Mike, thank you, that was a great way to put an exclamation point on the conversation with those last thoughts, I really appreciate that. You've been a tremendous guest and a wealth of information. I really appreciate you joining us on Connect Today. Mike Grigsby, thank you.
Mike Grigsby (33:51):
Scott, thank you, it was a pleasure being here.
Scott Dunn (33:56):
Thanks for joining us as we discussed some of the ways cities are embracing technology to become smarter. I'm Scott Dunn, and this is Connect, a podcast from Access Communications. Thanks for listening to the Connect podcast.
James Marcella (34:15):
The Connect podcast is produced in collaboration with Gusto, A matter company.