When it appeared that the information highway would pass right by the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), many of the city's business and government leaders were shocked.
Add to this the fact that, as Bill Hutchinson, senior partner with Ernst and Young Management Consultants, says, "Two years ago we were falling behind other communities in Canada and around the world because our private-sector leaders were not working together to create the synergy necessary for success," and the outlook for Toronto in the Information Age was bleak.
Enter SMART Toronto. The organization, which Hutchinson helped found and is now vice chairman of, was launched in April 1995. Its mandate: Give the 35 municipalities in the GTA access to the information superhighway via GT SmartNet, a proposed network of networks.
SmartNet would act as a regional telecommunications laboratory for research and commercial purposes as well as provide access to the existing national CANARIE (Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education) network. The latter is a telecommunications network based on ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switching technology (used for the transmission of large amounts of data, such as multimedia applications).
"The intention is to focus on network-based applications and technologies that surround it," says SMART Toronto spokesman Lawrence Moule. SmartNet will link Toronto to CANARIE's national ATM network, which had previously bypassed the country's largest metropolitan center. "Any economic community that hopes to be prosperous in the 21st century has to offer businesses -- customers and suppliers -- a network of allies and an inspirational environment, which includes the nitty gritty of high-tech infrastructure," Moule adds.
To this end, SMART Toronto also has plans for an InfoTech Centre. The downtown facility will offer members a showcase, training and information center. In addition, CommerceNet Canada is being established to accelerate Internet-based commerce. The initiative will involve organizations in the United States and Japan as well as a working relationship with CommerceNet in Menlo Park, Calif.
By bringing private-sector organizations together with non-profit and government agencies, as well as students, SMART Toronto hopes to reposition the city, effectively creating a knowledge capital in the Information Age. With a steering committee whose members hail from the fields of technology, communications, education and government, GTA's latest move along the information highway may prove substantial.
"The problem is that we are a far-flung, diverse and sometimes dysfunctional community when it comes to marketing ourselves," says Moule. But through SMART Toronto, "we're addressing this problem on an economic level."
--David Napier