Abstract
The concept of the smart city is growing in popularity and is receiving a lot of interest worldwide. An important characteristic of the smart city is the deployment and use of ICTs. Although the interest from research and practice for the new “smart cities” is understandable and justifiable, it is important that the broader context of the use of ICTs by city governments is taken into account.
Namely, three different ICT landscapes develop within city governments: information systems (IS) for the back office, the front office, and the smart city. Each of these landscapes has its own dynamic, organizational setting, and added value for the organization.
For the efficiency and effectiveness of the innovation strategy of city governments, it is important to develop an overarching vision and approach to the use of ICTs. In this way, integration of the different landscapes will be guaranteed in the future.
In this chapter, we describe various models that are used to characterize the use of ICTs within city governments, and we present an overarching model for the use of ICTs within the back office, the front office, and the smart city.
We then discuss the added value and the application of an integrated approach from different perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
In the definition of Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic (2015, p. 4959): “Of general interest to the field of IS are therefore all aspects of the development, deployment, implementation, use and impact of IS in organizations and society. However, the IS field is not primarily concerned with the technical and computational aspects of IT. What matters to IS instead is how technology is appropriated and instantiated in order to enable the realization of IS that fulfill various actors’—such as individuals, groups or organizations—information needs and requirements in regards to specific goals and practices”.
- 2.
Perez further explains (Perez, 2009, p. 6) “Thus, a technological revolution can more generally be defined as a major upheaval of the wealth-creating potential of the economy, opening a vast innovation opportunity space and providing a new set of associated generic technologies, infrastructures and organisational principles that can significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of all industries and activities.”
- 3.
Adding to conceptual confusion is that some scholars define Smart City as a Digital City. See for example the definition of Toppeta in Chourabi et al. (2012, p. 2290): “A city combining ICT and Web 2.0 technology with other organizational, design and planning efforts to dematerialize and speed up bureaucratic processes and help to identify new, innovative solutions to city management complexity, in order to improve sustainability and livability.” Conceptual clarity is needed and will help to understand why there need to be newer concepts developed to understand the smart city dynamics instead of re-using the existing egovernment concepts. See also Meijer and Bolivar (2015) who touch upon the necessity of new conceptualization for the smart city.
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Mulder, EJ. (2021). Living Apart Together? Discussing the Different Digital Worlds in City Government. In: Estevez, E., Pardo, T.A., Scholl, H.J. (eds) Smart Cities and Smart Governance. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61033-3_13
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