TECHNOLOGY:

IBM city expert talks Las Vegas tech

Michael Dixon wants Las Vegas to be a smarter city — and he hopes to give local leaders some insight to make it happen.

An Australian native with 29 years at IBM, Dixon has watched the technology giant transform from a cutting edge computer maker to a world-renowned consulting firm with an eye focused on the future. Today, as general manager of IBM’s “smarter cities” campaign, Dixon travels to the world’s largest metropolitan areas to offer insight to local leaders on how to better develop and expand their cities’ infrastructure and better position themselves in the global economy.

Michael Dixon

Michael Dixon

Today, he'll land in Las Vegas to address such leaders at a dinner sponsored by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance on how to integrate transportation, health care, public safety, education and urban management to grow Southern Nevada’s economy.

Dixon recently sat down with the Sun to talk about his vision for technology and its role in economic development. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

On the future of technology in cities

I start with the view that cities really haven’t changed much in thousands of years. But in the last two decades or so, cities have implemented an extraordinary amount of electronic infrastructure. That electronic infrastructure has brought about the opportunity to provide an unprecedented level of information, management and services that really is transforming cities around the world.

If we look at the standard things that matter most to cities — like transport, operational management, water management and health, education and social services — all of those kinds of things are what cities are looking at and developing new approaches to managing in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago.

On Las Vegas and its position as a budding city

Las Vegas is like many other cities, looking at itself and trying to work out what is the most productive and potentially empowering approach to take towards growing long-term sustainability and GDP. Of course it’s looking for different opportunities to develop the economy to attract high-paying jobs to ensure that Las Vegas maintains its reputation around the world. … People in the world know of Las Vegas.

It’s really important to think about how might these new technologies apply to Las Vegas in the 21st century and what might the publicly elected and commercial leaders do to help catalyze those kinds of developments.

On the rise of data and mega data centers such as Switch, located in Enterprise

The big trend to think about here is the way companies around the world, not just commercial entities and not just governments, but all sorts of organizations, are now realizing that the application of IT, rather than the IT itself, really provides benefits.

On the value of data in today’s global marketplace

It’s THE currency. Senior executives are no longer relying on experience and their gut and common sense and those things that have helped for generations. And we see young people who clearly don’t have those things at their age realizing that the power of data and analysis is beyond things that we’ve typically understood. You start getting into thinking about the statistics and the patterns and the thinking that is expressed through social media. If you go back to 1990, nobody could comprehend we would make this much progress as quickly.

Public transport also really struggles to be optimized. But what we’re seeing for the first time is cities saying, “If I’ve got the right facts and figures and I really understand not just what has happened but what is happening now, I can actually build models and predict how to allocate my resources and match that against demand and change the way in which people move around cities.” These things are possible in a way that just a few years ago couldn’t be considered.

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