My Smart City citizen’s platform was built to make it easy for South Africans to track and manage service delivery issues. The platform has been developed by Acumen Software, a software development and business consulting company.
The My Smart City is a citizen platform that allows city residents to engage service providers within a city. These service providers include Municipal Services, Emergency Services, Private Services, and events in the city.
My Smart City is a collaborative platform that allows citizens to engage key stakeholders in their community in a dialogue, sharing ideas and concerns to improve the services of the city.
The platform is available on Android, iOS, and on the web.
Johannesburg and Cape Town are the first two cities with access to Phase One of the free mobile and desktop-based platform that allows citizens to report potholes, monitor power or water outages, communicate with local municipal officials, raise a petition, and much more.
In time, residents will be able to source private services, manage crowd-funding initiatives and gain access to community social and sporting events.
“My Smart City is giving South Africans a voice to see the resolution of service delivery issues and to allow them to view issues and log incidents, prioritise them and connect the right service providers to resolve them,” says CEO of Acumen Software, Joao Zoio.
“We believe that the platform has the potential to UBER-ise service delivery by putting the power in the hands of citizens who use the platform. In time, the platform will also create jobs for thousands of citizens and private contractors.”
Acumen Software has secured private equity investment from Capitec-backed Imvelo Ventures and Sappi-funded Andzani Ventures, which has been used to fund the development and launch of the platform.
Acumen Software has a strong track record in several South African cities through its Mobile Field Service ERP Management SaaS Solution, Forcelink.
Forcelink is used by the City of Cape Town to manage the MyCiTi Bus infrastructure as well as by the City of Johannesburg’s City Power to manage outages and maintenance work on their electricity network.
My Smart City is also powered by Forcelink, which has over 100 customers and over 120,000 registered users.
“With the My Smart City platform we are leveraging our Forcelink B2B Mobile Field Services ERP Solution backbone to offer the public a B2C communal platform. The platform will allow citizens, city officials, councillors, and service providers to engage in a safe and controlled environment, with the sole purpose of improving services in the city,” says COO Kennedy Mogotsi.
Forcelink has extensive APls (Application Programming Interface) to easily interface with other systems such as ERPs, CRMs, Accounting systems, Project Management, equipment monitoring with SCADA, IoT, etc. Forcelink has a certified standard interface with SAP.
“My Smart City is an extension to Forcelink, which is a well-established software platform that was created because we saw a desperate need in the South African market for a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Mobile Field Services ERP Management Solution that could scale from SMMEs to large multi-nationals. Being a SaaS solution means that My Smart City is backed by a system that offers real benefits that non-digital solutions just cannot offer,” explains Mogotsi.
