Penang, 3 August 2020: Today, the City Council of Penang Island (MBPP) announced the continuation of its public-private collaboration with IBM Malaysia in accelerating Penang smart city initiatives and enhancing State Government service delivery to the public and business sectors.

Under the collaboration, IBM will continue to provide advisory, technical expertise, and consultation around four key technologies, namely Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT); that are related to MBPP's smart city implementations. MBPP is one of the many agencies and departments that have started multiple digital initiatives, especially under the framework of Smart City. It is also aligned with the Penang 2030 vision, with key focus in the digital economy by driving digitalization and innovation through technology for the State.

The journey with MBPP started in 2018 where IBM and its business partner Sophic Automation undertook a project with the MBPP to set up an Intelligence Operation Centre to address governance, mobility, social engagement, economy, and environment. By leveraging the Penang Intelligent Operation Command Centre (IOC), MBPP managed to get real-time data on governance issues such as illegal parking, illegal dumping, abandoned objects, and others.

To date, IBM has delivered solutions to tackle traffic congestion, mitigate flash floods, improve preparedness and response time to incidents and provide city data to executives and operational decision-makers to make timely decisions. 

"Penang is gearing up for the state development vision of Penang 2030 to be a family-focused, green, and smart state that inspires the nation. We continuously collaborate with IBM to help us transform Penang's landscape into a modern and smart state, providing higher income and better quality of life," said Mayor of City Council of Penang Island, Dato' Ar. Yew Tung Seang at the event. Also present were Penang State Executive Councillor for Housing, Local Government, Town & Country Planning, Jagdeep Singh Deo A/L Karpal Singh, and City Secretary, City Council of Penang Island, Dato’ Ir. Addnan Mohd Razali.

Dato' Yew said that infrastructure is a crucial economic and social driver of sustained growth and acts as a real enabler of a city's competitiveness. Empowering technology into the core systems and infrastructure will enable new levels of intelligence of public service in Penang. "This initiative has a profound impact on the MBPP's information management standard and preparing the city for future growth, especially after COVID-19 pandemic," he added.

Under the new collaboration term, IBM will continue to offer its technology, services, and expertise for the development and deployment of cloud infrastructure to support MBPP's ongoing smart city initiatives. IBM will also continue to advise MBPP on planning, developing and deploying AI solutions that can help improve MBPP’s operational efficiencies and innovations in how work and processes are executed in order to improve MBPP’s service delivery to provide better quality of services to the public.

In order to deliver the advisory platform, IBM organised a design thinking workshop with the MBPP leaders and members of the team to introduce IBM design thinking methodology which focuses on a few key areas including how emerging technology can help the city government to resolve city issues, lessen energy consumption, effective use of workforce and resources, and preparing the city for future growth. During the session held in June 2019, MBPP and IBM sat together to discuss how it can adopt the right technology to achieve the highest level of efficiency in both systems and infrastructure.

IBM Malaysia's Managing Director Catherine Lian said that with the direct impact of COVID-19 halting the essential public services, the race for digital acceleration for socioeconomic resiliency is more imperative than before. The continuous collaboration with MBPP exemplifies IBM's commitment to supporting the local governments in Malaysia to accelerate the nation's digital transformation agenda and seize opportunities to build sustainable prosperity for the rakyat.

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Media Contact:

Ms Teh Chen Yee
P: 04-2592097
E: cyteh@mbpp.gov.my

Ms Trista Efendi
E: trista.efendi@ibm.com