Photo par Sunnyhtho via Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)In short:
- Hypervision aggregates the flows of several business systems into a single interface, without replacing them.
- It differs from supervision, which manages a single domain in detail and at a higher level of granularity.
- Its relevance depends on the number of systems to cross-reference, and therefore on scale: it is easier to justify across an inter-municipal body than in an isolated municipality.
- Its value is measured by the number of decisions it speeds up, not by the number of indicators displayed.
What hypervision does
A local authority rarely runs a single piece of software. It runs a dozen, bought at different times, from different suppliers, each with its own interface. Urban hypervision sits above that estate and offers a common reading of it.
A reading layer, not a replacement
This is what distinguishes hypervision from an application overhaul. Business systems stay in place and continue to be used by the staff who know them. Hypervision queries them, normalises what they return and displays it.
Hypervision and supervision
Confusion between the two terms is frequent and it has consequences for how the requirement is written.
- Supervision is vertical: it covers one domain, for example the connected street lighting network, at a level of detail that allows action on a specific piece of equipment.
- Hypervision is transversal: it covers several domains at a lower level of detail, and serves to identify what warrants opening the relevant supervision system.
The two are complementary. Hypervision with no supervision behind it displays alerts that nobody can act on.
The scale at which it becomes useful
The threshold question deserves a serious answer. Cross-referencing two systems does not justify an extra layer: a monthly export will do. The calculation changes as the number of sources grows and when several municipalities share the same infrastructure, a logic specific to the smart territory at inter-municipal scale.
What it depends on
Hypervision is only worth as much as the data it receives. It therefore presupposes a territorial data platform upstream, capable of normalising formats.
Frequently asked questions
What is urban hypervision?
Urban hypervision is a software layer that aggregates the flows of several of an authority’s business systems into a single interface. It does not replace existing applications: it reads them, normalises their formats and displays them side by side, which makes it possible to cross-reference information that previously lived in separate applications. The aim is not to see everything, but to make visible whatever triggers a decision or an intervention.
Are hypervision and supervision the same thing?
No. Supervision covers a single domain, for example the street lighting network, and is used to manage it in detail. Hypervision sits above several supervision systems and aims at the overall view, at the cost of less detail.
Does a small municipality need hypervision?
Rarely on its own. At municipal scale, the number of systems to cross-reference is often too small to justify the extra layer. An inter-municipal or county scale, with pooling across several municipalities, changes that calculation.