Urban Computing and Smart Cities: Towards Changing City Processes by Applying Enterprise Systems Integration Practices

Abstract

For developing smart cities, it is necessary to integrate all components of a city as a system of systems. This is facilitated by urban computing as a technology to address the complexity of providing adequate services to citizens through various city sectors/systems. Since business processes across city sectors/systems should be aligned with the objectives of urban computing, Business Process Change (BPC) is also a significant prerequisite of city systems integration for Smart City Development (SCD). However, there is limited research on understanding of BPC and its challenges in SCD, while in the private sector, the BPC best practices for Enterprise Systems Integration (ESI) have already been recognised and implemented. By considering city as an enterprise, this research aims at providing an understanding of similarities and differences between BPC challenges in the two contexts: SCD and ESI. This study collects data through literature analyses, interviews, and document analyses and suggests that many BPC challenges in SCD have an equivalent from the ESI context. In addition, the findings provide new insights through some challenges that are only relevant to the SCD context, so-called unsolved challenges. Consequently, the study developed a comparison framework, which indicates that the learnings from ESI could be utilised for the SCD context, in order to address BPC challenges. This will assist city authorities in designing their SCD roadmap, prioritising BPC challenges based on the efforts employed for ESI, and thinking about addressing unsolved challenges; as well as smart city solution providers to develop solutions for changing city processes.