Making cities smarter is the only way to modernize urban governance systems and capabilities. Nanjing, the capital of eastern China's Jiangsu province, is stepping up efforts to evolve over the next few years into a megacity with a permanent resident population exceeding 10 million and an estimated GDP of more than CNY2 trillion.

A megacity also has to be smart. To make Nanjing a first-class international smart megacity, Nanjing Information Center promotes data governance innovation and improved resilience.

Establishing a Next-Generation Government Cloud for Digital Transformation

In 2010, the Nanjing government started deploying a government cloud to explore a new, more intelligent approach to city governance. In 2013, Nanjing was listed in the first batch of national pilot smart cities aiming to advance the deployment of unified distributed cloud computing platforms. This program was intended to promote the migration of hundreds of core government applications to the cloud.

In 2019, the Nanjing government enlisted the help of Huawei to establish a next-generation government cloud, which was a significant step for its smart city construction. Since that time, Huawei Cloud Stack has provided Nanjing with 46 cloud services in 11 categories, including IaaS, PaaS, big data, and blockchain.

Nanjing's next-generation government cloud serves all government organizations as a unified digital foundation for cloud computing, data aggregation and exchange, geographic information collection, AI, IoT, and big data applications. The government cloud provides them with robust and accurate data support powered by unified data import, governance, mining, and analysis tools, as well as easy-to-use integrated application components. It allows the organizations to reduce repeated development investment and easily, efficiently share and exchange data across different information systems.

As of June 2022, the government cloud has provided cloud computing, storage, network, and other infrastructure cloud services and O&M support for 1,216 information systems of 127 organizations in Nanjing. It has provided intelligent tech support for a large number of Nanjing's key projects such as My Nanjing, 12345 Government Service Platform, Smart Water Management System, and Digital City Management.

Driving Precise Megacity Governance with Data Convergence

During this 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) when China is promoting the development of a digital economy, Nanjing is transforming from a supercity into a megacity with its city pattern and intelligence level undergoing a critical leap. Data interoperability and sharing plus cross-level, cross-organization collaboration being enabled to quickly handle emergencies has been especially important.

"It's a surprise to me that housing funds can be withdrawn through my phone", said Xiaolin, a citizen of Nanjing, when he went to the bank to apply for housing funding for rental expenses. The staff instructed him to log in to the "My Nanjing" app using his mobile phone, find the "Rental Withdrawal" in "Housing Fund Service", and apply. His application was quickly authenticated and verified. The entire process took less than 3 minutes.

Such convenience for citizens is backed by a government data exchange platform and a trusted data management platform built by Nanjing using Huawei Cloud Stack. The platforms fully integrate and make fine use of multiple types of government affairs related data such as personal identity data, household registration data, real estate registration data, social security payment data, and housing fund data. This lets data smoothly flow through organizations across the national, provincial, municipal, and district levels.

To date, 172,654 data directories of national, provincial, and municipal platforms as well as the video networking platform have been mounted on the municipal government data sharing and exchange platform. The platform has also aggregated 920 data sets and connected to 77 interfaces of national, provincial, and municipal departments and 168,642 video interfaces. It enabled data to be shared across provincial and municipal departments and has helped exchange 1.35 petabytes of data and call interfaces 110 million times in 383 application scenarios.

Modernizing Urban Governance for Better Resilience

In the long run, there is an urgent need to deepen the digital transformation of urban governance, improve urban resilience, so it can handle crises better; and explore new ways of modernizing megacity governance.

An all-in-one platform for centralized management is the only path forward to modernized urban governance.

With a next-generation government cloud, the Nanjing government will focus on the Three-Year Action Plan for the "All-in-one Platform for Centralized Management" of Nanjing City Operations. They will promote the construction of an intelligent monitoring and dispatch platform, a comprehensive command and control system, and a key service information system for epidemic prevention and control.

They will also leverage the "My Nanjing" app to empower grassroots governance. They are trying to move forward faster to aggregate data into one platform, acquire a bird's view of city governance on one screen, enable quick collaboration between relevant organizations for emergency response, and solve problems at the grassroots level. They will continue promoting centralized management, encouraging more scenario-specific applications, and share more resources with districts and event counties at the grassroots level. This way, the Nanjing government can comprehensively improve city governance and effectively promote high-quality development.

Reimagining Industries with Data Governance for a Higher Level of Citizen Satisfaction

In the future, Nanjing's government cloud will be reinforced with "data chain", "data brain", and "data shield" systems. The "data chain" system provides a digital supply chain for cross-department, cross-region, and cross-level data circulation and governance. The "data brain" system promotes the collaborative innovation of big data and provides intelligent applications for diverse sectors like social governance and public services, finance, energy, transportation, and manufacturing. The "data shield" system significantly improves big data security and strengthens the security protection for computing power and data resources.

Digitalization reimagines a wide range of industries, improves quality of life, boosts management efficiency, and makes Nanjing a better place to live in. Nanjing, a more resilient, vibrant, and smart city, is emerging.

The government cloud will be continuously upgraded, and its improvement and iteration will make Nanjing a city full of imagination: there will be autonomous vehicles, dark factories, fingertip services, telemedicine, and virtual parks with intelligent security protection. The data on the cloud is to be deeply integrated with real life and the physical economy, making Nanjing a city of happiness.