Local Government

“Cities Outlook 2011 highlights some of the challenges confronting cities today: economic development, unemployment, changing demographics, ever-increasing resident expectations - all coupled with significantly reduced budgets. Leaders will need to act decisively and on a broader range of topics if their cities are to transition successfully into ‘Smarter Cities’.

The greatest advances in improving city life for residents are created by visionaries who are able to see and plan beyond organisational boundaries. Understanding where you are today, with respect to your peers and competitors, is an essential first step towards setting and achieving goals - this report helps provide this valuable information.”
Stephen Leonard, Chief Executive, IBM UK and Ireland

“Thriving cities are essential to the UK’s economic recovery and to our continuing global competitiveness. Investment and growth in London remain crucial not only for Londoners and for London businesses - they also support growth and prosperity in other UK cities. Each of our great cities is unique, but also part of a network linking people, ideas and products. I warmly welcome the work of the Centre for Cities in helping us to understand better the economic importance of cities, the relationships between our cities and how we can work together to succeed in the global economy.”
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

News and Features

Medway Youth Trust keeps young people on course ... Using analytics to guide interventions that help young people remain in education, employment or training (PDF, 728KB)
Medway Youth Trust is using IBM predictive analytics solutions to identify young people who are at risk of dropping out of education, employment or training, and plan interventions to prevent them from becoming disengaged.

IBM's sofa city tour explores a smarter future (link resides outside of ibm.com)
Watch the video here.

The Modern City
Cities are complex, noisy, congested and bursting at the seams, yet people continue to chose to live and work in them. We need our cities to thrive in order to secure all of our futures. Where should we start?

Introducing IBM PureSystems
Built-in expertise, integration by design and a simplified experience.

Shop for IT services
Improve efficiencies, make savings and explore cloud capabilities

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council Turns to IBM Business Analytics
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) have implemented IBM business analytics software to help transform its budget planning process thus freeing up finance managers to use information to better evaluate, analyse and support business decision makers.

Southwest One news
Read all the latest news and announcements about Southwest One

Flintshire gains a greener IT landscape with IBM (PDF, 493KB)
Flintshire has ambitious goals to reduce its power consumption and cut carbon emissions. For the growing IT infrastructure, the emphasis is on eliminating “white space” in servers and storage devices through consolidation and virtualisation.

Dundee City Council builds an energy-efficient infrastructure with IBM (PDF, 393KB)
To meet its environmental objectives, the IT department wanted to revolutionise its infrastructure through the use of server virtualisation and thin-client architectures.

Bradford-i programme
The story on how Bradford Council and IBM worked together on the council's Bradford-i programme.

IBM survey reveals Londoners believe better cooperation between public sector services would improve the way the city is run
IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) Smarter Cities survey, of over 2,000 adults from four UK cities, has found that Londoners want better cooperation between public sector services, as well as closer communication with their city leaders.