HA NOI (Biz Hub) — Vietnamese cities have been invited to register for the Smarter City Challenge Grant Programme to receive support from IBM experts to find solutions for social issues in 2014.

Da Nang's traffic control centre applies solutions of IBM to monitor traffic and control traffic lights system. Photo courtesy of IBM

In their application forms, hopeful candidates should suggest projects to solve important issues in their their cities. Applications should be sent to IBM via the website www.smartercitychallenge.org before November 8 this year.

IBM experts will spend three weeks in the chosen city collecting and analysing available documents, and meeting authorities, enterprises, local residents and not-for-profit organisations. The specialists will gather opinions on causes and solutions from them.

Following their analysis, the experts will provide suggestions about how to solve the problems in the city, and provide a detailed implementation plan a few weeks later. The plan will also include methods other cities used to deal with similar issues successfully.

Da Nang received the grant in 2012 and has received support from the IBM to enhance the co-operation and improve solutions between city agencies for complex project management.

The programme has supported 100 cities in the past three years. — VNS