Public services need to adapt to the needs of their customers, the citizens. Often new e-services are technology-initiated, but the Smart Cities approach starts with the user. This guide provides an introduction to the customer journey mapping (CJM) process, and explains how CJM fits into both customer insight and business process improvement approaches. It provides practical guidelines on how to make the most of CJM.

Urban thinkers, practitioners, academics, governments and third sector partners met in Edinburgh for Creating Smarter Cities 2011, a two day conference that focused on what makes cities smart, how cities work, and how we need to adapt to make cities fit for the 21st century.

More than 60 academics, urbanists, businesses and government partners joined together in Edinburgh yesterday for the first day of Creating Smarter Cities 2011. A range of speakers from Universities and the private sector brought together their visions of what makes a city smart and their plans for the future as they work to create smart cities.

The final conference agenda has now been published for the 2011 Creating Smarter Cities Conference. Creating Smarter Cities 2011 will be held in Edinburgh on June 30th and July 1st, and will bring governments, municipalities, academics and businesses together to study how cities and research centres can create ‘smart cities’, and how cities can deliver better electronic services to citizens.

Registration for Creating Smarter Cities 2011 is now open!
http://www.epractice.eu/en/events/2011-creating-smarter-cities-2-confere...

Creating Smarter Cities 2011 will be held in Edinburgh June 30th/July 1st, and will bring governments, municipalities, academics and businesses together to study how cities and research centres can create ‘smart cities’, and how cities can deliver better electronic services to citizens.

The Smart Cities workshop on Co-Design learned the partnership to use co-design as a strategic method for developing services and solutions for their cities. Co-design is an ongoing process that allows providers to collaborate with customers to help improve service design and delivery.

Registration is now open for the April 27th workshop on using co-design to develop and deliver better services. The workshop is open to Smart Cities project partners, policy makers and practitioners and will run 9am (sharp) til 5pm.

The City of Edinburgh Council’s new website has become the first local authority website in Scotland to achieve the highest ranking of four stars in the annual SOCITM independent audit. The re-development of the website is one of Edinburgh Council’s Smart Cities pilot projects.

On April 27th Edinburgh Napier will host a highly interactive workshop for Smart Cities partners to explore approaches to co-design in the project and to see what lessons we have learned about the best way to implement co-design.

The new website of Edinburgh Council focuses on usability. The use of services and geobased information allows citizens to see what services are relevant in their context. The website has been designed based on customer research and focus groups.