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facilities, the platform serves as a communication tool with citizens as well, improving quality of life and
business conditions in the city.
Tendencies to Integrated Operation Centers
Centers have quickly become a tool and environment to promote new business and technologies. In
contrast to using cameras merely to visualize what is going on in the city, the intelligence of the agencies
is used to improve services and integrate actions between different departments that would otherwise be
isolated and make separate decisions.
Those tendencies are presented in Figure 2, highlighting the relationship between the diffusion of players
and Integrated Operations Centers, and the extension to more complex and complete functionalities.
Figure 2: Tendencies to Brazilian Integrated Operation Centers
As we see the domains of application of the described Centers, it is possible to identify extensions in all of
them. The Center envisioned in São Paulo was expected only to monitor and predict weather
emergencies, but the developed infrastructure and its potential functionalities led to an integrated Center
supporting traffic, urgent medical response, and surveillance and security. However, these features are
not yet available and there are still no functionalities directly available to the population or developed by
citizens. On the opposite side, Curitiba offers a geo-referenced platform with services available to citizens,
where not only citizens have access to more integrated information about public services, but it also
facilitates the integration and management of city infrastructure by the government. Therefore, as more
complete applications are developed and solutions improved, centers become much more integrated,
leading to improvements in business conditions and enhancement of citizens´ quality of life. The
promotion of digital inclusion initiatives is also an important step to provide better conditions for
citizens. Nevertheless, there are still many new and old challenges to overcome, and one should not
expect that an Integrated Operations Center would solve all of them.
Players on Integrated Operations Centers
The development of integrating centers depends on different players. In the case of São Paulo, technology
development depended mostly on an international corporation, which implemented an integrated system
allowing authorities to act faster, by means of much more accurate information. It was a global solution
developed and deployed in response to a local demand.
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