The continued growth of the population in urban areas has called for smarter cities for the 21st century. While great progress has been made in the last two decades in this regard, remaining challenges faced by city planners have forced them to pursue an alternative version of smart cities. Recent advancements in several technological areas like 5G communications, blockchain, and virtual/augmented reality have facilitated this process. This paper aims at providing a review of the definitions and components of current smart cities. It also discusses new developments, recent trends, and business opportunities.
Over the past two decades, the topic of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has attracted considerable attention among researchers and practitioners. Despite a lot of efforts to study it from different points of view (mostly from a technological perspective), little is done to develop our understanding of SOA from an organizational perspective. Therefore, this study aims at reviewing the literature on SOA from an organizational point of view. To this end, 65 journal papers (published between 2005 and 2020) were selected from different electronic databases for study. After a careful review of selected papers, four distinct categories of research themes were identified: SOA adoption, implementation, governance, and organizational impacts and applications. Moreover, major factors influencing SOA adoption as well as potential areas of impact of SOA in firms were determined.
Purpose
This study aims to explore the impact of applying a blockchain-based information system in the international students’ administrative workflow in the context of a public research university in the USA.
Design/methodology/approach
Specifically, a prototype of the blockchain-based information system was developed and tested. The system has the potential advantages of being more efficient, more transparent, faster and safer.
Findings
The results show that digital registration could increase student registration efficiency with a blockchain-based application.
Research limitations/implications
There are also some limitations of this study. As an early exploration of the use of blockchain technology in higher education, this study could be further extended in several aspects: different institutions (e.g. private vs public school) may have different operational strategies towards international student affairs. The different administrative processes should be discussed in the context of different institutions, and thus the proposed system should be tested and evaluated based on the requirements of different institutions. Use experience and feedback from different users such as university administrators and students should be considered and investigated with respect to the necessary improvement of the proposed system. The extensibility and scalability of the system should be assessed to accommodate any potential modifications of the administrative process.
Originality/value
The findings show that a blockchain-based information management system has the potential to improve data transmission efficiency and protect information privacy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.