From vision to action

Smart Cities inspire imagination: intelligent sensors, personalized services, real-time monitoring… The concept fuels collective ambition with promises of modernity and efficiency.

But on the ground, CIOs and urban transformation leaders face a different reality: how do you move from concept to concrete implementation?

• What costs and timelines should you anticipate?
• How do you plan for dependencies and risks (cybersecurity, data sovereignty, interoperability)?
• How do you get both elected officials and citizens on board for such a profound transformation?

At Boldo, we believe a Smart City cannot simply be declared, it must be modeled, managed, and shared. That’s why we offer a pragmatic approach focused on two key levers:

• Resilience: providing a real operational cockpit, capable of mapping all of the city’s digital assets as capabilities, applications, data flows, infrastructures, and stakeholders.
• Transformation: building a clear roadmap, anchored in concrete use cases, supported by an adapted organizational architecture, and presented through a visual framework accessible to decision-makers and citizens alike.

This article shares a practical case study. For confidentiality, all data shown in illustrations has been anonymized.

Antibes : The Smart Citadel mapped with Boldo

Antibes-Juan Les Pins has twice been recognized at the Smart 50 Awards, an international competition honoring the most innovative smart city projects.

In 2019, the city was awarded in two categories: Urban Infrastructure and Digital Transformation, alongside global leaders such as Chicago, Dubai, and Singapore.

A few examples of initiatives:

• Deployment of smart cameras able to detect population or traffic flows in real time.
• Optimization of the drinking water network through combined use of cartographic, historical, and operational data.
• Predictive analytics tools to plan maintenance, prioritize investments, and anticipate failures.

👉 Read the original Tribuca article on the Smart 50 Awards: Antibes enters the race for smart cities

Beyond the recognition, what this truly illustrates is the ambition of the city and of its CIO: Patrick Duverger, to become a reference in urban innovation, leveraging technology, data… and now, a disciplined digital architecture.

A city, dozens of dervices, hundreds of applications

Antibes operates over 30 municipal services, partners with hundreds of public and private organizations, manages 80+ business applications, and oversees a vast array of physical assets such as roads, parks, water networks, signage…

With Boldo, the city can model this entire ecosystem coherently:

• Functional domain: description of the services delivered by the municipality.

Boldo Demo - Nested Maps

• Implementation view: each service is linked to the actors, applications, and physical assets that deliver it.

Public services - Inventory view by Boldo

Detailed oversight for every service domain

In a Smart City, each domain: whether energy, mobility, education, or finance, relies on a complex ecosystem of stakeholders, assets, applications, and services.

With Boldo, these layers of information are dynamically mapped and explored through nested, interactive views, offering a clear picture of operational and technological dependencies.

Example: Finance & Budget, a need for transparency and resource control

From the “Finance & Budget” public domain in the nested maps, Boldo enables you to:

• Visualize shared responsibilities between services (CIO, finance department)
• Identify core applications like the Finance ERP used to manage public spending
• Understand data flows between applications (CRM, GIS, Data Warehouse)
• Spot critical infrastructures (Oracle server, SaaS hosting)
• Navigate to partners and vendors involved, down to software publishers and system integrators

Boldo demo - ERP finance 360° view

At the end of this visual navigation, a user can open the ERP application’s record to see:

• Metadata (role, hosting type, functional satisfaction, contractual data)
• Dependencies (data flows, servers, owners, users)

This visual, usage-driven approach gives local governments a modern governance capability for their information systems — aligned with Smart City challenges.

A governance framework for leaders and executives

Beyond mapping, Boldo brings Antibes a unified governance framework where:

• Elected officials can prioritize investments
• City executives (DGS) can anticipate friction points
• Department heads can plan their evolution
• The CIO can supervise the full portfolio of applications and partners.

Conclusion

The digital transformation of cities is not just about tools or sensors.
It requires the ability to make complexity readable, connect technical domains with human processes, and align them with political objectives.

This is what Antibes has set in motion, in depth, with the methodological foundation provided by Boldo.