2024-2025: the shift of Smart territorial

A promising market that concerns all territories

The 300 participants were not mistaken: the market, dynamic for several years, is now booming.

It concerns all community profiles, rural and urban, small towns and metropolises.

The priority of construction sites is given, in line with their desire for environmental transition, to building energy (50% of respondents), lighting (50%), water (45%) and waste (33% ). New projects are emerging, particularly with environmental risk management (15% of projects).

A preamble seems shared: such a project is firstly part of the digital transformation of the territory. This dynamic has already been launched, since 80% of respondents have initiated the digitalization of their services. Another prerequisite is to ensure the security of information systems, which is the case for 60% of respondents.

Communities generally begin their “smart” deployments with a demonstrator: an experiment in real conditions, on a limited part of their territory. This approach, which makes it possible to observe and refine, proves fruitful in moving on to a larger scale. This also shows that communities are able to adapt their projects to their needs and specificities (e.g. real estate assets, building typology, population density, human activity, existing infrastructure), supported by mature technologies in terms of of IoT equipment.

Les points de vigilance

But there remain points of vigilance for connecting the territories of tomorrow.

Starting with the subject of data platforms. Although there has been significant progress in the implementation of data collection and management, the communities, apart from a few precursors, have not yet set up a transversal platform. The most used tools are business, visualization tools, responding to immediate needs. Hypervisors and digital twins, whose adoption is underway, offer new services in terms of decision-making, optimization and territorial modeling while controlling the data.

This is partly explained by the heterogeneity of the offers, but also by the difficulty of understanding new tools and interfaces. But once a demonstration, with real awareness is made to users (local elected officials, etc.), the usefulness is better understood.

Concerning coordination, a real dialogue between IT service departments and business services is decisive for matching needs and digital expertise – throughout the project.

Industrialists and communities clearly agree on the need for departmental and regional stakeholders to promote the articulation and convergence of initiatives. This pooling makes it possible to make the offers readable and accessible for all municipalities, to deploy territorial platforms on a larger scale and to control the data.

Keeping this fine-grained approach to the territory while rationalizing resources (costs, skills) as well as coordinating initiatives and ensuring coherence on the scale of a larger territory, are among the challenges of the years to come, as is the implementation place of balanced and sustainable economic and financing models.

2024-2025: a tipping point

Thus, all the signals suggest that the tipping point is close…

According to the hypotheses, between 40% and 80% of French communities will deploy connected and sustainable territorial projects within 10 years. If 50% of communities indicate having obtained subsidies for one or more of their projects, the Observatory notes variable sources (State, European Union, region, etc.) and unequal access depending on the use cases. Above all, these subsidies play a key role in triggering a smart project, since digital initially represents an unprecedented expenditure item. A definite area of ​​progress, particularly through support for environmental transition projects…

For Patrick Chaize Senator of Ain and Vice-President of the FNCCR: “Indeed, given the scarcity of resources, we are all aware that we will have to make informed choices, objectified by these metrics, in consultation with citizens. These tools will help improve sharing and collective work. »

For Antoine Darodes, Director of Digital Transition Investments at Banque des Territoires: “Supporting communities in the appropriation and control of data is a strategic focus of the Banque des Territoires and as such we are ready to co-finance engineering and study investment projects. »

For Philippe Le Grand, President InfraNum: “The implementation of smart projects in France is a real trend in the territories. Everyone is committed to it, far from the preconceived idea that these deployments could be the prerogative of metropolises. But these projects require a lot of transformation. Pooling on a sufficient scale and coordination between stakeholders are levers to monitor. They will make it possible to optimize the use of tools, in particular data platforms, which will also have to evolve towards more interoperability in the long term. »

[1] projects integrating deployments of sensors or internet of things, connected across the territory