The smart city narrative is usually framed around tech adoption: deploying IoT sensors, artificial intelligence, and urban management dashboards. However, our experience at Gobe suggests taking a step back to focus on a quieter, more decisive factor: defining the concrete problem before shopping for technology.

Why does this matter? The precision with which a city articulates its operational challenges directly dictates the quality of its dialogue with the market, the types of solutions it explores, and its ultimate ability to integrate innovation into everyday public services.

In November, we will participate in the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC)—the world's premier event for cities and urban innovation. Organized by Fira de Barcelona under the theme "Urban Solutions, Real Impact," SCEWC is a strategic meeting point for public administrations, tech providers, and urban experts shaping the future of local government.

Ahead of the event, we want to kick off a conversation through our GovTech lens: how can cities better understand their most pressing challenges to deliver tangible, scalable solutions?

Our perspective is built on hands-on experience. In recent years, we have worked on over 130 public sector challenges alongside local and regional administrations across Spain—including the Basque Country, Asturias, Navarre, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Valencia, and Catalonia.

Across these engagements, clear patterns have emerged: many top smart city priorities boil down to systemic operational issues shared across public management.

This article serves as an invitation to explore those challenges.

The Smart City Agenda Through Public Challenges

SCEWC provides an ideal backdrop for this conversation. The upcoming edition will gather over 27,000 attendees from 138 countries, along with public representatives from more than 900 cities driving smart urban solutions. The congress program reflects today's top priorities: digital transformation, applied AI, green energy, efficient governance, sustainable urban development, and social equity.

Across various municipal departments seeking innovation—from environmental services to health and sports—we consistently see shared structural hurdles. These are precisely the types of challenges where niche tech companies—startups, digital SMEs, and scaleups—deliver the most value.

Based on our work with public sector teams nationwide, we have identified six core challenge archetypes:‍

1. Operational Efficiency & Capacity: Doing more with less by reducing manual workloads, response times, and reliance on fragile legacy processes.‍
2. Service Design & User Experience: Tailoring public services and administrative procedures to meet the actual needs of citizens, businesses, and public staff.‍
3. Institutional Integration & Coordination: Overcoming siloes across departments, fragmented data systems, and disconnected communication channels.
4. ‍Data-Driven Public Intelligence: Transforming scattered data into actionable insights for resource allocation, policy planning, and prioritization.‍
5. Anticipation, Prevention & Resilience: Building predictive capacity in sectors exposed to high uncertainty or environmental risk.‍
6. Operationalizing Sustainability: Translating high-level climate goals and green transition commitments into daily management and investment decisions.

Rather than a rigid classification, these six areas provide a practical starting point for aligning smart city ambitions with GovTech solutions. Below, we break them down into two main focus areas with real-world examples.

Three Core Frictions in Urban Management

The first of these problems is operational capacity to execute with agility. Manual processes, bottlenecks, or dependencies on key personnel continue to constrain service delivery. We are talking about challenges that primarily seek technology that acts as process infrastructure: automation, internal operational tools, workflow optimization, or support for administrative processing.

The first major hurdle is operational capacity. Manual workflows, administrative bottlenecks, and single-point-of-failure dependencies continue to hinder service delivery. Challenges in this space require technology acting as process infrastructure: workflow automation, internal operational tools, stream optimization, and processing support.

While less visible to the public, this backend efficiency directly impacts front-end service quality, bringing us to the second common hurdle: service design and user experience.

A compelling case in point comes from the Bizkaia GovTech program, which tackled bovine birth registrations, a procedure performed roughly 18,000 times a year that previously required in-person visits to municipal offices. A pilot tested a WhatsApp conversational assistant that enabled full self-service online, slashing average processing times to just 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Similarly, in Madrid, tourist and cultural information services were personalized using virtual assistants and dynamic routing platforms.

Public sector teams are moving beyond basic digitization. They are redesigning the relationship between administration and end-users. Innovation here relies on intuitive interfaces, clear contextual information, personalization, and multi-channel support.

This connects directly to the third friction point: institutional integration. The most impactful solutions break down departmental silos and consolidate information touchpoints through unified access, integrated data visualization, traceability, and centralized communication.

The startup eAgora offers a strong example of how GovTech can tackle these foundational issues. Selected through Govtech Lab Madrid to address a waste management reporting challenge for the Fuenlabrada City Council, eAgora's solution processed over 900 citizen incidents during its pilot, significantly reducing administrative burden while streamlining communication across SMS and accessible digital displays.

This initial success scaled to a regional level when the Community of Madrid piloted the platform across multiple municipalities to centralize local services—an initiative spearheaded by the Digital Transformation Cluster.

Today, eAgora’s platform is used across more than 600 municipalities for various civic engagement and communication use cases, including community participation initiatives like those in Puigpelat, Catalonia.

Smarter Urban Decision-Making: Data, Foresight, and Sustainability

A fourth recurring imperative is elevating data-driven public intelligence. While the first wave of municipal digitization successfully generated data logs and metrics across city departments, today's core challenge lies in validation, integration, and actionability. This requires advanced analytics, automated classification, executive dashboards, and decision-support tools.

From data maturity stems the fifth challenge: anticipation. Urban decisions are still overwhelmingly reactive, particularly around climate, mobility, and risk management. GovTech enables cities to simulate scenarios, forecast trends, and act proactively.

Tools like advanced monitoring systems and digital twins are rapidly gaining ground. A prime example is Navarre’s TwIN project, which deployed digital twin simulation and analytical capabilities to inform everything from urban energy planning to climate risk mitigation in Pamplona.
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Finally, proactive decision-making feeds directly into operationalizing sustainability. While green transitions dominate municipal strategic agendas, a persistent gap remains between high-level policy targets and ground-level execution. The fundamental challenge is translating climate goals into practical decisions regarding public buildings, waste infrastructure, and transit networks.

BRISA AI illustrates how data, foresight, and sustainability converge. The startup utilizes a pre-trained model powered by over 11 billion time-series data points tailored for energy management. Applied within a public innovation project led by CTTI (Generalitat de Catalunya) as part of the European consortium GovTech4All, the solution tackled scattered energy, maintenance, and investment data across a municipal portfolio heading toward 6,000 public assets.
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Deployed across 400 buildings in a single month, the platform generated baseline indicators to prioritize energy investments and simulate efficiency measures—yielding initial energy consumption cuts near 20%.

The future urban agenda is being forged at this exact intersection of public sector problems, institutional capacity, and startup innovation.

We look forward to continuing this conversation: sharing fresh case studies, practical questions, and key takeaways.

See you at Smart City Expo!

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