Know-how to lead digital transformation: The case of local governments

Local governments are in an ideal position to integrate government, private, and citizen data to deliver beneficial new digitally enabled public services. However, progress toward achieving the benefits has stagnated in many cases. This is because managers lack the requisite know-how to lead the implementation and enactment of integrated enterprise systems to improve the processes of public service delivery, part of a journey called ‘digital transformation’. If digital transformations are to progress, we need more nuanced empirical elaboration of the know-how managers require. To that end, this study reports evidence from case studies in 11 local governments in Canada. The findings provide the empirical basis for a theory of the know-how managers require to lead the implementation and enactment of integrated enterprise systems in support of digital transformation. We then propose a new theoretical model of how to transfer that requisite know-how to managers through public-private partnerships, and thereby mitigate barriers to that transfer

Seeking the 'Smart' in Cities: Managing the process of Innovating with IT

A smart city can be defined as a city seeking to address public issues via information technology solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, municipally based partnership. Core to the smart city agenda is realizing a new innovation strategy for municipal governance based on high levels of cooperation among stakeholders to improve the efficiency and quality of public service delivery. Governments can enact an integrated digital platform to support high levels of cooperation among stakeholders with process management, and thereby align cooperative activities with public priorities. Drawing on punctuated equilibrium theory, we examine what know-how enables some city managers to manage implementation of an integrated digital platform for innovating with IT, and what know-how is lacking in city governments that fail to do so. We report evidence from case studies in eleven city governments to identify what knowhow city managers require for the competence to manage such an implementation

Enterprise architecture for small and medium-sized enterprises: a starting point for bringing EA to SMEs, based on adoption models

Enterprise architecture (EA) is used as a holistic approach to keep things aligned in a company. Some emphasize the use of EA to align IT with the business, others see it broader and use it to also keep the processes aligned with the strategy. EA has gained importance in larger companies. Although a lot of research is being done on EA, still hardly anything is known about its use in the context of a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Although EA can offer a lot of benefits to SMEs, still hardly any SME uses EA. In this paper, the authors analyze both SMEs and EA techniques and investigate the adoption of EA in SMEs. At the end of the chapter, some guidelines for EA technique developers are proposed