Ho Chi Minh City sits along the Saigon River—home to over 7 million people…
…and what seems like a trillion motorbikes.
The Vietnamese have a saying, “Live in a globe and you are round. Live in a pipe and you are long”—meaning our environment shapes us.
As Ho Chi Minh City grows, so does the need for the city to provide a healthy, sustainable and livable environment for its citizens.
My name is Michele and I’m an IBMer. In February, five colleagues and I traveled to Ho Chi Minh City as part of IBM’s first executive team participating in the Corporate Service Corps.
We came from across the globe with backgrounds from sales, consulting, marketing and research and a common desire to gain global experience, share knowledge and improve the world.
Our charge was to bring IBM expertise to bear on the city’s most difficult challenges. And, work together to shape a vision for a smarter city for the people of Ho Chi Minh City.
The city leaders identified five challenge areas—transportation, water management, food safety, education and electronic government.
They called these “life or death” issues for the city.
Over the next three weeks we worked separately and as a team to analyze each of these city challenges.
Dan took the lead on water, Roy and Clara on transport, Evelyn on electronic government and Guru focused on education and innovation. I focused on food safety.
As part of our analysis we undertook field visits to clamming operations, a transport control center, hi-tech parks and vegetable farms.
We saw a side of Vietnam rarely experienced by tourists. Roy and Clara spent hours in the hot sun watching a traffic jam—on purpose!
In our last week, we provided a roadmap for becoming a smarter city to the city leaders with defined starting points for each challenge area.
Our final recommendation to the city was the creation of an integrated IT -management system to collect, analyze and act upon data from across all the departments.
In doing so, they’d be able to use information in new ways. For example, they could look at flood prediction models from the water department in the context of traffic patterns…
…and identify vulnerable parts of the city’s transport network in the event of a large storm system.
My colleagues and I were rewarded by participating in a project at the convergence of business strategy and citizenship…
…and by seeing first hand how our work can truly benefit society.
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