How cities break down departmental barriers with connected IoT data

February 2021. Texas. A winter storm hit, and what should have been a challenging few days turned into one of the most catastrophic infrastructure failures in modern American history. Over 10 million people lost power. Some went days without electricity. Hospitals limped along on backup generators. Water treatment plants shut down. Tragically, hundreds of Texans lost their lives.

Here’s what keeps me up at night about that crisis: Texas was just 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from a total blackout that would have taken weeks – maybe months – to restore. Four minutes.

The real problem wasn’t the ice or the snow. It was that power grid operators couldn’t communicate with natural gas suppliers.

Transportation departments had no coordination with emergency services. Water utilities weren’t looped in with power management. Each agency had data. Lots of it. Sensors everywhere, monitoring everything. But when the crisis hit, those ...