Smart city operations for local government using open data and IoT analytics

The Challenge

Local authorities sit on rich but fragmented data — waste, traffic, energy, housing, telecare — locked in incompatible legacy systems and subcontractor silos. Councils increasingly do not even own their own data, and cross-organisation secure sharing is hard; static open-data portals turn into “data graveyards” that never inform real operations. Cities needed a way to capture, secure, analyse and act on live data to run more smartly.

The Solution

The Open City Data Platform (OCDP) was NQM’s answer: an open, non-proprietary platform that gathers data from many different sources and lets cities capture, secure, analyse and use it. It used open APIs and data formats to maximise interoperability between data and services, connecting devices, sensors and legacy equipment and processing data in real time to provide insight for the planning and running of city operations — applied across waste, traffic, energy, agriculture, infrastructure planning and telecare. Security and privacy were treated as first-class: certificate-based sharing across complex council/subcontractor value chains. OCDP is recognised internally as an early precursor to TDX — the platform lineage that became Volt4.

Outcomes

The platform was deployed with Hampshire County Council and the cities of Southampton, Cambridge and Liverpool. NQM sensors went into 200 council homes in Southampton to predict when refurbishment would be required. The feasibility phase alone delivered 28 data adaptors (against 3 planned) and over 40 demo applications (against 2 planned), plus an application-deployment tool shortening the path from data to usable application. The project was featured as a national success-story case study on GOV.UK (July 2016) — CEO Nick Allott described the work as “breaking the dam holding back data” — and NQM grew from two people at founding in 2010 to twelve employees by 2016.