WINDSOR, ON. Facing a room full of municipal IT staff, futurist Jim Carroll warned that too many of Canadas towns and cities are falling behind when it comes to entering the 21st century.

Too many, he said, are led by change-resistant baby boomers who rely on legacy systems; underestimate technologys impact on their citys operations and the degree to which the generations following them have embraced it; and ignore the private sectors impact on citizen expectations.

If I go to Amazon and buy something, I get one-hour delivery and instant status updates. With Dominoes, I can know exactly where my pizza is. So if something goes wrong with my garbage pickup service, I want the same type of information, Carroll, a trends and innovation expert who has given presentations to the likes of NASA and the Walt Disney Corporation during his 20-year career, told the audience at the 2017 MISA (Municipal Information Systems Association) Ontario annual conference.

Carrolls example wasnt random either: After reminding the audience how easily they could search a topic on Google or access their iPhones home screen, he shared what happened when his home city of Mississauga recently neglected to pick up his familys garbage likely the result of a nearby construction project.

When his wife called Mississauga staff, they blamed the citys parent region. Which led to a series of tweets.

If Im going to interact with the City of Mississauga, I want to do it through my smartphone, Carroll said. I expect the same degree of interaction and quality of service that I get from Amazon.

Modern municipalities, Carroll said, must learn to address service disruptions by providing mobile support and simplifying their customer service processes, lest they become victims of public complaints, as the city of Mississauga was on his Twitter feed.

Its a whole new world, he said. Youve gotta up your game in order to get there.

A leading challenge in entering the 21st century, Carroll said, is the outsized role change-resistant baby boomers often play in a citys leadership, and their inability to recognize the role technology plays in the next generations life.

For example, he said, he once gave a presentation at a Texas-based conference attended by some 600 CEOs and attempted to run a text messaging-based poll asking how ready they believed their companies were for the digital revolution. Three responded.

When he presented at his sons high school and ran a similar poll for 300 students, 89 per cent responded. Within 30 seconds.

The next generation is different, Carroll said. When I talk at banking conferences I warn them: the next generation doesnt understand bank reconciliations. They dont know what a cheque is. For them, banking is something they do through their mobile device. And theyre going to expect the same when paying their taxes, or accessing any type of municipal service.

Carroll was also quick to emphasize that he didnt mean to condemn all boomers.

I think a lot of them out there do get it, he said. One of my sons heroes is Ottawa mayor Jim Watson hes a very effective user of Twitter, and doing everything he can to accelerate the citys digital transformation.

Boomers, he noted, grew up in a period when computer programming was synonymous with frustrating programming languages such as COBOL (an acronym for common business-oriented language), which is still used in some 50 per cent of large companies.

No other generation in the history of mankind will need to take a course in COBOL, Carroll said. All my kids have known is friendly technology, with a mouse, so we can expect their relationship with computers to be different.

Carroll began his presentation with three statistics:

The first was that 65 per cent of todays children in preschool will eventually hold jobs that dont exist yet.

The second was that half of what is learned in the first year of a four-year bachelors degree is now obsolete by a students fourth year, even in fields such as computer science and biology.

The third, more anecdote than statistic, illustrated how quickly much of our technology has caught up to the 1960s vision of the future, originally meant to be far later than 2017.

For example, Carroll found scenes in The Jetsons, the Hanna Barbera animated series depicting life in 2061, that predicted Skype

Instagram filters

And even the Apple Watch.

The future arrived 50 years early, he joked.

The lesson municipal leaders need to take away from the Jetsons (and Star Trek, which Carroll noted has also influenced a great deal of modern technology), is that IT is no longer confined to a single department, but the lifeblood of their future communities.

Consequently, their IT staff need to enjoy a more elevated role.

IT managers need a seat at the table, he said. They need to make sure the mayor and city council understands that their role is changing.

More importantly, he said, they need to pursue and their leadership needs to provide the scale of funding needed to support and accelerate their communitys entry into the 21st century economy, one based on IT.

They need more play money, he said, adding that municipal leaders should think of CIOs as chief imagination officers, executives capable of disrupting everything from garbage collection to highway use to home care to city services access to paying taxes in a way that will attract further investment.

Those chief imagination officers need to be able to go out and work on the types of technologies and new capabilities that will accelerate their municipalitys knowledge and help them take their place among Ontarios communities of the future, Carroll said.

Go here to see the original:

Futurist warns municipalities to adapt to the 21st century or be left behind - ITBusiness.ca