Planning and designing future communities and cities requires coordination and support from multiple stakeholders, both within and across local government areas.

As councils operate within their own geographical boundaries, they may have limited visibility of the various Smart Cities initiatives which can be leveraged and adopted locally for their own community.

We can now access ubiquitous affordable Cloud, Mobile, Network and Data.

This is enabling new ways to deliver services to places, communities and cities and is creating new insights for policy setting.

Councils have limited income streams, with reliance on council rates, stamp duties, community & service fees, parking fines. 

As a consequence, councils have limited budgets to innovate and speculate. 

Councils have limited cost effective access to data analysts, scientists and engineers to own, host, secure, curate, process and predict with data. 

It can be challenging to find local government and ICT experts to offer a complete solution based on open interoperable standards.

Opportunities exist to align Council and IT strategies with the Paris Climate United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and create opportunities to connect citizens to the global community, while supporting sustainable and resilient communities

Councils are trying to transition from "death by pilots" to scalable extendable platforms to support multiple use cases and options for open and closed data exchanges.  This is not easy and can be expensive if not based on common standards.