IBM launched City Forward today, a free website that aims at improving the quality of life in cities of all sizes around the world.  IBM aims to do so by helping officials make sounder and more scientific decisions on city services. The company closely collaborated with universities, cities and NGOs in order to make public such valuable data. The content consists of statistics and trends in several domains, from education, safety, health, transportation, land use, utilities, energy, environment and personal income to spending, population growth and employment.

With this free tool, all stakeholders, from public officials to policy makers and citizens, will be able to compare and analyze accurate data before making any opinions or taking decisions. “City Forward substitutes data for intuition, making cities more livable, maintaining both government transparency, and civic literacy,” said Stanley S. Litow, IBM vice president of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, and President of IBM’s Foundation.  “Ultimately, obtaining unique insights into information will help society make smarter and more informed decisions to benefit the public good.” Momentarily the program has gathered information on 55 cities from all continents, but in the following period the number of subject will expand.

The initiative from IBM continues the free marketplace trend that started recently, and also worth noting is Microsoft’s similar program in cooperation with the City of Miami on using mapping data and inputs from the city’s existing 3-1-1 hotline to create a map of where potholes and street problems ares so city officials can tackle the issues in an organized way. Similar leads will be visible in the near future as data analysis becomes a new form of actionable knowledge.

IBM is not new to tackling CSR as we have witnessed their Green City initiative as well. About one year ago, IBM signed a partnership with the city of Shenyang to launch a joint development lab for computer applications that help forecast water pollution trends, plot efficient traffic plans and devise caps on industrial carbon output. Also, a month ago we covered IBM’s partnership with Range Technology Development for the building of a colossal cloud-computing data center in Hebei Province, China by 2016.

Companies are aware of the huge potential provided by strategic PR moves and corporate socially responsible programs. Such initiatives greatly improve a company’s image and the latest social programme from McGraw-Hill for education in developing nations speaks for itself.