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Van den Bergh, Joachim; Viaene, Stijn
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150370
The `smart city' label is internationally used by cities, researchers and technology providers with different meanings. As a popular concept it is widely used by city administrators and politicians to promote their efforts to prepare their cities for the future. There are decent definitions for what a smart city is, but it is much harder to find a trustworthy description of what it takes to become a smart city and how a city administration is impacted by that effort. This paper sets out to investigate how a city, aspiring to become a `smart city', can manage its internal organization to realize that ambition. Specifically, it describes the case of the City of Ghent, Belgium, and the key challenges it has been facing in its ongoing efforts to be a smart city. Based on in depth interviews with city representatives six key challenges for smart city realization were identified and tested with a panel of representatives from five European cities that are in the process of becoming a smart city. The study contributes to a more professional pursuit of the smart city concept and elaborates the academic body of knowledge on smart city development, as an instance of IT-enabled transformation in public services.
Scholl, Hans Jochen; AlAwadhi, Suha
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150369
Around the end of the first decade in the 21st century, quitea few city governments in municipalities of various sizes began conductingso-called smart-city initiatives. While many of these initiatives havesuccessfully reached for low-hanging fruits and easy wins when responding tothe growing demand of smart online services, others have identified the needfor fundamental change and overhaul with regard to organizationalintegration and alignment as well as interorganizational information systeminteroperability as a pre-requisite for creating smart operations andproviding smart services. Sweepingly changing the governance over citywideinformation and communication technologies (ICTs) turned out to be at thecore of creating an environment conducive to smart operations and smartservices, and ultimately, smart city government. The City of Munich inGermany embarked on a fundamental overhaul of its ICT structures. Thearticle describes the case and the challenges, insights, and workarounds inthis multiyear change program, which ultimately led to the successfuloverhaul of the ICT governance model. In principle, Munich's approach mightbe transferable to other cases. At the very least, the case holds valuablelessons learned when engaging in smart government initiatives in practice.
Batlle-Montserrat, Joan; Blat, Josep; Abadal, Ernest
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150366
We claim that local e-services benchmarking studies summarized in indexes dolittle to enhance city managers' and academics' understanding of actuale-government performance, or to improve the e-services offered by cities. Weundertook a different benchmarking approach, focused on learning bestpractices among cities, in late 2008 and early 2009. A benchlearningmethodology (BLM) was developed, and a pilot study with 15 European citieswas carried out. In this paper, we present the actual impact of thebenchmarking study with respect to improvements in services, as theeffectiveness of e-government benchmarking has rarely been evaluated. Wediscuss and analyse the results of a survey carried out in the same 15cities four years after the pilot study. This paper presents evidence thatBLM helped cities to identify good practices that they could learn from, andthat some e-services were subsequently improved. The survey reveals thatsome changes are needed in the benchmarking methodology. The main one is theupdating of the BLM bottom-up e-services catalogue, which is deeplydiscussed within the changing context of Smart Cities, especially theenlargement of the ecosystem of e-services to include citizens, the thirdsector, entrepreneurs, companies and other actors. A second one is themeasurement of the adoption of e-services by citizens, also rarely assessed.
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150367
In recent years, ``smart cities'' have rapidly increasedin discourses as well as in their real number, and raise various issues.While citizen engagement is a key element of most definitions of smartcities, information and communication technologies (ICTs) would also havegreat potential for facilitating public participation. However, scholarshave highlighted that little research has focused on actual practices ofcitizen involvement in smart cities so far. In this respect, the authorsanalyse public participation in Japanese ``Smart Communities'', payingattention to both official discourses and actual practices. SmartCommunities were selected in 2010 by the Japanese government which definesthem as ``smart city'' projects and imposed criteria such as focus on energyissues, participation and lifestyle innovation. Drawing on analysis ofofficial documents as well as on interviews with each of the four SmartCommunities' stakeholders, the paper explains that very little input isexpected from Japanese citizens. Instead, ICTs are used by municipalitiesand electric utilities to steer project participants and to change theirbehaviour. The objective of Smart Communities would not be to involvecitizens in city governance, but rather to make them participate in theco-production of public services, mainly energy production and distribution.
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150368
Information and communications technology (ICT) is increasingly used inbureaucratic and regulatory processes. With the development of the `Internetof Things', some researchers speak enthusiastically of the birth of the`Smart State'. However, there are few theoretical or critical perspectiveson the role of ICT in these routine decision-making processes and themundane work of government regulation of economic and social activity. Thisarticle therefore makes an important contribution by putting forward atheoretical perspective on smartness in government and developing avalues-based framework for the use of ICT as a tool in the internalmachinery of government.It critically reviews the protection of the rule of law in digitizedgovernment. As an addition to work on e-government, a new field of study,`e-regulation' is proposed, defined, and critiqued, with particular attention to thedifficulties raised by the use of models and simulation. The increasingdevelopment of e-regulation could compromise fundamental values by embeddingbiases, software errors, and mistaken assumptions deeply into governmentprocedures. The article therefore discusses the connections between the`Internet of Things', the development of `Ambient Law', and how the use ofICT in e-regulation can be a support for or an impediment to the operationof the rule of law. It concludes that e-government research should give moreattention to the processes of regulation, and that law should be a morecentral discipline for those engaged in this activity.
Anthopoulos, Leonidas G.; Reddick, Christopher G.
2016 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-150371
Smart cities have been evolving since their early appearance in late 1990s from metropolitan-wide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions to today's innovations - not necessarily based on ICT - that utilize city resources and improve local everyday life. This paper attempts to answer two research questions: (a) Does e-government research provide the appropriate theoretical capacity consisting of terms and frameworks that define smart city? and (b) Is e-government research evolution able to provide the appropriate theoretical capacity to deal with smart city challenges? To answer these two research questions this paper follows a multi-methods approach comprising of (a) retrospective literature review (27 interdisciplinary journals, from 1997-2015 that publish smart city works are examined with regard to e-government and smart city) and define the key-areas of study (i.e., e-government in smart city etc.); and (b) prospective Delphi study (involving 16 experts in both e-government and smart city domains from prestigious universities, organizations, and cities across the globe), which identify action areas (i.e., livability and co-design) and measures for future e-government research contribution to the smart city. The results of this study shed light on existing gaps, interrelations, and reciprocities between e-government research and smart city and define an agenda for future research.
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