Sustainable Connected Cities: Vision and Blueprint towards Managing IT for City Prosperity and Sustainability

Abstract

With the continued global trend of rural to urban population migration, traditional city management approaches are being challenged to both develop and sustainably manage the economies, societies and environments of their cities. Many are turning to computing technologies for assistance. While computing technologies are becoming ever more advanced, appropriate management approaches and frameworks for a city to optimize contributions from such computing technologies are often lagging behind. This paper presents a vision for sustainable connected cities (SCC), and a nascent city management framework called the Sustainable Connected Cities Capability Maturity Framework TM (SCC-CMF TM)-for how to implement such a vision, and a case study application. The contributions of design science research are briefly discussed in relation to these approaches.

Digitalization of energy facility management processes in the Voronezh region

“…An integral part of the region's digitization is the focus of solutions on the development of digital skills, management training, the creation of public-private partnerships, the creation of innovation clusters, the development of the local market and financing mechanisms. Special attention should be paid to the development of digital infrastructure in remote and rural areas, as well as raising awareness of the rural population about the benefits of digital services [11][12][13].…”

Action Design Research in Practice: The Case of Smart Cities

“…Concluding, we found in ADR a relevant approach for providing systematic methodological guidance for current IS research conducted in the context of Smart Cities, and we demonstrated its suitability by relating its main principles to the key notions arose from a SLR study. This statement will be further demonstrated within the next section, in which it will be provided an example of successful application of ADR in a Smart City research project regarding the development of a Sustainable Connected City Capability Maturity Framework (SCC-CMF) [52].…”

“…Formalization of Learning) emphasizes once again the importance of having a (7) Generalized Outcome that can be further developed into general solution concepts for a class of field problems. The IS Smart City researcher is responsible of relating the specific city -solution to a significant contribution to theory by extracting the design pattern [51], understood as a generally reusable template solution to commonly re-occurring challenges (see [52]). The research outcome is then a theory-ingrained artifact, where theories allow the research team to both structure the organizational problem as an instance of a class of problems in literature, and guide the design [32].…”

“…The aim of this section is to describe a successful usage of ADR in a Smart City research project. It was conducted by a research team that included representatives from the academic field (National University of Ireland Maynooth and Dublin City University), in collaboration with Dublin City Council (DCC) and Intel Corporation, and was focused on the development of a Smart City maturity model (SCC CMF) [52]. In this paper we focus on outlining how the research activities that were implemented are consistently related to the 7 principles of ADR [43].…”

“…In this paper we focus on outlining how the research activities that were implemented are consistently related to the 7 principles of ADR [43]. In other words, we focus on the methodology that was used, rather than on the content of the final artifact itself that was already widely described in [52]. A "quadruple-helix" approach [53] was adopted, where the awareness and the influence of the city authority as well as the technological experience and insights of Intel Corp., could be combined with rigorous research from the academic field (ADR, Principle 4).…”