ISO 37120 Certification

It introduces the common basis for reporting, comparison and benchmarking of city performance independently of it size. Its new revision ISO 37120:2018 and relevant standards ISO 37122, ISO 37123 and others further expand the scope of guidelines and methodologies and set of indicators to steer and measure the performance of city services and quality of life.

Many innovative urban communities and their administrations realised the need to undertake practical steps in the implementation of these standards. However they came across the issues that make introduction of these standards into the daily administration life too complex, time consuming and bringing additional overhead without little practical improvement in the concrete local governance procedures.

Innovation approach toward implementation of standards in the Digital Societies

In out time of smart everything and digital transformation the paper-only guidance in the standards implementation is not efficient and does not help in achiveing the compliance with the target quality standards.

The new approach to the standard introduction is as follows:

Let's monitor compliance with actual data on community performance and sustainability with a state-of-the-art online digital solution!

The Smart City Monitor digital platform as a standard certified service for municiaplitines enables this approach to be realised within the framework of the EC Digital Europe project DOME - A Distributed Open Marketplace for Europe Cloud and Edge Services.

ASIDEES developed new approach and cost-effective procedures for municipalities and their consultants fostering easy and cost-effective pathway to practical introduction of ISO 37120 and other relevant standards into the daily life of the communities and public bodies. It provides full transparency of the city performance results for the administrations and other stakeholder groups. The local governance itself decides about access of particular stakeholder groups to actual local data presenting the analytics of urban process and management results, ongoing and predicted change, and its dynamics in real time.

The implementation proceeds in small steps, each sufficiently quick and easy in learning and developing experiences with minimum overhead to ongoing daily activities of the public body employees. Its results foster practical compliance with the recommendations of these key international standards for quality management and governance. The holistic monitoring and analysis of diverse complex data become significantly more effective and easy. It positively assists employees in the municipalities and utility service providers in smart sustainable management and improves productivity.

The certification program realises the growing trend to continuous auditing as effective method of conformity under minimum costs and efforts. It is based on practical testing for the prevalence of a risk and the effectiveness of a control.

ASIDEES support of practical implementation of ISO 37120:2018 and certification

We offer the following unique innovation package of services for customers involved in managing and consulting activities in communities including administrations and utility providers and various educational organisations:

Preparing and explaining the project content, its activities by the sides and planning
Setting the latest Smart City Monitor (SCM) technology, Digital CityTwin model by ISO 37120 and relevant sample data sets in MS Excel spreadsheet files
Studying ISO 37120 standard, its recommendations and requirements
Setting the municipality procedures for regular periodic updating of the 20 spreadsheet files with data required by Standard
After data are updated Digital CityTwin collects it automatically, calculates all ISO 37120 standard indicators of quality of life and status of each theme object and presents the results at dashboards and interactive reports in real time for all stakeholders - administrations, management and employees (optional public data access is managed by the municipality itself accordingly to local policies)
Official certification of the compliance with ISO 37120 requirements is based on the implementation results and its full transparency.

The details of the certification service package for customers

Providing the full set of materials for guiding customer employees in the learning the ISO 37120 standard requirements and its supporting digital transformation technology and relevant training (webinar or local on-site workshop options)
Setting Smart City Monitor engine as cloud technical platform to run for the whole service period (at least one year with possible annual extensions)
Setting the Digital CityTwin Model by ISO 37120 to run on Smart City Monitor engine
Providing the sample data set accordingly to ISO 37120 requirements for quick learning and quick preparation of local data (60 data sets in MS Excel spreadsheets)
Assisting customer employees in learning how to prepare and update source data in spreadsheets and link it to the city Smart City Monitor and set operational goals for urban processes and verify the results
Supporting employees in the analysis of ISO 37120 indicators implemented in CityTwin model
Learning the procedures to add custom indicators and data sources required by local management or policies or urban development plans
Setting stakeholder access to Smart City Monitor dashboards and interactive analytic reports accordingly to the municipality policies of data access for continuous auditing
Supporting the customer employees to keep the dashboards and interactive reports online for the duration of the certification service
Quality assessment of the implementation results and data
Assisting the customer in an effective public presentation of the achievements
Certification of municipality management and employees and issuing relevant certificates by ASIDEES as independent evaluator and auditor based on actual implementation results and visibility of ISO 37120 KPI benchmarks online

Note: ASIDEES invites local consulting and auditing specialists as partners supporting municipalities

Implementation stages:

Stage 1. Setting up the operational environment, learning, training and preparation of data (~3 months)

Stage 2. Preparation and implementation of operational procedures for compliance, data collection and verification procedures and documents (~3 months)

Stage 3. Quality assessment and audit based on running ISO 37120 urban model running on Smart City Monitor technology installed in the city, annual confirmation of conformity, certificate issuing (during the whole service period)

During the year: Continuous support, data and documents updating, system upgrading for the whole service period.

Unique benefits for administrations and citizens of cities

The unique services allow forward-looking city councils, municipalities, utility providers, consultants and community education to obtain the cutting-edge opportunity for learning how to introduce new international standards into their daily practices and obtain a certificate of compliance with ISO 37120. The solution is open for upgrading to accommodate newly developed standards such as ISO 37122, ISO 37123 and others as well as for adding local indicators for smart governance and management.

Our innovative certification assistance service is available worldwide including small and middle size communities and their organisations dealing with urban services, a development that are interested in transparency of local governance and politically neutral evidence of achievements. It provides cost-effective easy steps toward realisation of Smart City concepts and fosters employees learning of novel digital transformation applications that can effectively assist in Smart Sustainable Governance. The certification program realises the growing trend to continuous auditing as effective method of compliance under minimum costs and efforts.

Certificate on the Wall or Dashboard for All?

Nowadays in times of digital transformation and smart citizens the key question arises:

What is the right way to spend public money and efforts in municipalities: To get the paper certificate at the wall City Hall to please the visitors or set online goverannce performance dashboard for the whole community?

The answer depends on the municipality policy of openness and its drive for efficiency and transparency and innovation resulting in the major differences and benefits for the communities.

A typical certification service results in the official “Certificate of Conformance” by some auditor or service provider presented as the paper document. Internal auditing's testing of controls is based on risk and often performed months and years after the city activities have occurred. It includes reviews of policies, procedures, approvals, and reconciliations based on samples of the past. As result the paper certificate fixes single time assessment of the management system based on the past data and manual audit of procedures and performance. It rarely results in public access to the performance results which are anyway single-time relevant. After each passed day since the certificate issuing, its value decreases and becoming less and less relevant to the actual urban change and its real-life accelerated dynamics.

Why? Because people bring up the question “It was last year, what's up now?”

Such paper certificates do not intend to present ongoing processes and its conformity for the community to foster continuous improvement, efficiency and engagement. It is recognized today, that this approach results with a narrow scope of evaluation and has little real value for improving administration business performance or regulatory compliance and transparency of governance.

ASIDEES offers new unique practical ISO 37120 approach to the certification that adds the full real time transparency of management system performance in compliance with the standard. The CityTwin by ISO 37120 presents the city performance accordingly to ISO 37120 in real time to all stakeholders that local administration may authorise for access to information using online monitoring dashboards, interactive reports and rich analytics.

The necessary data is automatically collected from multiple data sources such as spreadsheets, databases, sensors, IoT and automated systems. The data can be provided by local or national organisations e.g. municipality departments and/or utility providers and/or local university it can be updated in necessary time periods e.g. quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, each hour, etc.

Our offer includes ISO 37120 training, implementation, consulting, gap analysis, documentation, internal audits with the optional participation of the national certification bodies and auditors in the certification process. The post- certification monitoring and upgrading services enable the municipality and its stakeholders with a practical use of the standards in the daily activities and open possibility to further extending and upgrading the open city model by ISO 37120 with key local infrastructure objects such as districts, buildings, streets, energy and water and waste objects, etc. Each object can be provided with own indicators, data sources and applications, focused status and maintenance reports, etc.

The city certification results include:

Continuous automatic auditing of compliance with international standards and local management practices
Holistic and detailed information about city processes accordingly to international standard ISO37120 assisting in smart sustainable governance for improving Quality of Life and efficient use of resources in the city and continuous improvement
Transparency and publicity of achievements by local city administration and service providers, it’s clear demonstration in real time and online for the target stakeholders
The trustful evidence of achievements that is free from any political or other bias
New options in justified setting of local objectives in urban development and planning based on evidence data
Easy adding of optional infrastructure objects, indicators and data sources to accommodate the change
Availability of actual values of key performance indicators and statistical information and in-depth analytics at any time and any place across the urban area
A realisation of performance and quality assessment accordingly to international standards for urban planning being open for localisation
Optional in-depth applications representing necessary focus areas in further detail, e.g. water, waste, energy, transportation, environment, etc
Ability to link a rich variety of optional data sources such as sensors, smart meters, IoT, SCADA and other automated systems, social networks, mobiles, etc
Automatic data collection from many spreadsheets and databases located in different places and systems and its real-time processing that strongly improves employee productivity, decrease overhead and costs
Optional focused views into city life processes, its quality and resilience supported by interactive dashboards, reports and mobile applications for stakeholders and citizens
Continuous access to ongoing results, analysis of trends and holistic sustainability in real time
Fostering accelerated improvement of the quality of life, business models and investment attractiveness of the community as an innovation leader promoting the transparency.

Strong evidence in public debates and image making in public relations

Transparency and actual information about the real-time results of local governments provide effective and strong arguments in various public events including elections, reviews of ongoing city developments, relevant publications, discussions in social networks and mass media.

The city evidence data, presented to the community by city administrations accordingly to the latest international standards, provides the non-biased evidence basis for any public discussion or event. Supported by easy analytics and benchmarks for comparisons e.g. with the past or with the other communities, and being available at any time, in any place and on any mobile device, such online transparency introduces compelling arguments to prove and effectively present the actual achievements and improvements of quality of life to the local citizens and regional and national administrations and international community.

ASIDEES team will support, train, consult, guide and provide the customers and relevant local partners with the latest cutting-edge solution, annual assistance services that realise the city online information system in compliance to ISO 37120 and other relevant standards.

In this case, the Certificate of Compliance (as paper or its online copy) is verified by the online evidence data that provide continuous automatic auditing of performance results in compliance with international standards and local management practices in consideration of the actual city planning and sustainability goals.

Our unique service offer is based on the experience of Smart City Monitor applications as novel technology for urban communities and its successful implementation in Europe including Smart Urbana and Smart Pedestrian Nets projects, as well as the involvement of our team in various international developments such as new international standard “Data Processing and Management to support IoT and Smart Cities & Communities” by International Telecommunication Union.

Smart City Monitor as the technical platform to support the certification procedure

Smart City Monitor engine is installed in cloud for each municipality customer and runs the Digital CityTwin model defined in strict accordance with ISO 37120. The engine is linked with the municipality data sources presented as simple spreadsheets that can be stored at different shared locations, for example, local municipality server or Google Docs or Dropbox. The spreadsheets are updated by the responsible municipality departments or local organisations and specialists accordingly to local governance policies. The data from all spreadsheets is collected and processed by Smart City Monitor engine automatically and transformed into the KPIs and object sustainability statuses in real time.

The Digital CityTwin model 37120 presents the city as Big and complex cyber-physical System of Systems connecting both physical and virtual worlds. It is open for adding various city infrastructure objects (districts, buildings, streets, etc), their KPIs, multiple heterogeneous data sources including databases, smart meters, sensors, IoT, automated systems, vehicles, drones, etc. The model runs on Smart City Monitor engine enabling a digital transformation of data into a rich set of customized information services.

The city Smart City Monitor dashboard and reports can be linked to the existing city website (e.g. “cityscore.citydomain” or “performance.citydomain”, etc) to present online performance of the city as a whole and its urban processes to city stakeholders in real-time. The access rights to various information and analytics can be set accordingly to local municipality policies and national legislation.

Costs

The certification service package cost is provided upon the request. We welcome city consulting and auditing partners participation as partners in the training and certification process.

The additional costs shall be applied in cases of

Local training courses (transportation and accommodation costs for the trainer).
Inclusion of the national certification and accreditation bodies into the certification procedure (upon the request of the customer).

The package costs can be revised for different countries in a relation to the customer inquiry, actual city sizes and budgets.

Do you have questions regarding the service package? Or want to be the certification program partner or promoter?

Check our Questions and Answers section, or contact us for further details: info@asidees.org or by contact page here