Louisville’s innovation chief says smart cities are like ‘building a house’

Chief innovation officers, or CIOs, are increasingly running point on cities’ digital transformation, updating or keeping them on the cutting edge of a fast moving technological world.

The specific responsibilities of the role vary from city-to-city. Some are hyper-focused on rolling out smart-city projects and fostering relationships with local innovators, while others wear not one but two CIO hats: chief innovation officer and chief information officer.

Zoom in: Grace Simrall is  chief of civic innovation and technology for the Louisville Metro Government in Louisville, Kentucky, a position she’s held since August 2016. Under Simrall’s leadership, the city of nearly 800,000 has pursued private partnerships, including one with Waze’s Connected Citizens Program around traffic management, and another with Microsoft to pre-empt the effects of automation via workforce upskilling and re-skilling. Simrall now oversees an agency of over 80 people, up from 69 when she began.

But even before Simrall’s tenure, the city was attempting to use tech to solve real problems for its citizens. In 2012, the city created Air Louisville, an air-quality monitoring program that supplied over 1,000 residents with sensors to affix to their asthma inhalers, Simrall said, which the city then used to track hot spots of poor air quality.

We spoke with Simrall to discuss her vision for innovation in the Louisville metro area.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does Louisville approach smart-city development and technological innovation as a whole?

We view a smart city like we’re building a house. And what I mean by that is, you don’t build a house just to build a house. Similarly, we’re not doing a smart city just because it sounds cool. It’s really meant to drive better outcomes for our residents. And those outcomes are around economic development. So jobs and family-supporting wage jobs...sustainability, improving public health, improving public safety, improving mobility, transportation, right…But you can’t have a house without a very solid foundation. And for us, that is our critical infrastructure, whether that’s wired or wireless connectivity, the actual servers…That might be on premise or in the cloud, depending on the solution. The nuts and bolts of making sure that you’ve got that foundation in place.

The next layer up, so, your first floor, is where your IoT device network comes into play. The second floor is the data that’s generated. Because the data will help either lead to improved policies, which then drive these outcomes, or very directly [be] used for service delivery. So, for example, we leverage our fiber to build upon it all of the network devices for our bus rapid-transit line. And so now, we’ve got, as you can imagine, signal prioritization. And that means that transit times for those who are using that line are significantly improved. It also means congestion mitigation, so we’re improving the air quality around that area.

And then, of course, you can’t have a house without walls. So, two major walls for us: one is around public-private partnerships, because we believe that there are things that the city does very well, and that we should own and do. But there are things that…other [public or private] entities do very well, and we should absolutely partner with them. The other major pillar wall for us is equity. If this isn’t solving a problem for the most vulnerable in our community, then we’re doing things wrong.

What’s a smart-city initiative you consider successful within Louisville?

[We developed] a Microsoft partnership; it’s called the Future of Work [Initiative]. This is an example of us focusing on something that was important [but] not necessarily urgent. So back in 2019, the Brookings Institution said that Louisville was the eighth most vulnerable MSA [metropolitan statistical area] to job loss from AI and automation. That’s just not what you want to hear. And we were talking about 28% of jobs being vulnerable to being disrupted, and then for Black workers, 44% of jobs being vulnerable.

At the time, we were talking about this taking decades to be realized, but instead of just putting it off, we said, “This is something we need to take action [on] now.” We need to start thinking about how we transform our industry; to think about replacing tasks, not jobs; reimagining what the work—what a job—looks like in the future; and then reskilling and upskilling our workforce so that they can take advantage of these new jobs.

This is part of an interview series with city innovation officers. Click here to read the previous interview, with former Miami CIO Mike Sarasti.