Making a city smart requires a strategy to meet the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Many cities are treating projects of city transformation into a smart city as typical IT projects. In fact, there is a basic challenge of understanding the drivers behind city transformation and building a solid strategy planning to support and guide this transformation. To meet these challenges, this work proposes a methodology for defining and evaluating digital strategies for building smart cities. It presents how to develop and implement strategies for smart city development. Despite extensive and deep research on cities' successful transformation into smart cities, a gap exists on the methodology that the cities follow in transforming their services into digital services and making them smarter. This work builds on an integrative literature review of smart cities and digital strategies to propose an integrated methodology for smart cities development.

There is still a conflict among the definitions, frameworks, and formulation of the digital transformation strategy in the literature. Despite extensive research on Digital Transformation Strategies and Digital Transformation Assessment, there is not a clear and global meta-model describing the general concepts and guidelines of the digital transformation to frame and drive a successful digital transformation. Several digital transformation approaches have been presented in the literature, these approaches are focusing on specific cases and specific concepts. The present paper describes the digital transformation and its relationship with IT governance. It presents how IT governance can lead the digital transformation. A literature review has been conducted on the most well-known IT Frameworks (COBIT, ITIL, CMMI) and their structure in order to provide a standard and known framework by practitioners. This paper proposes an Integrated Methodological Framework for Digital Transformation Strategy Building. The proposed framework is called IMFDS, it is based on IT governance elements (Business Strategic Planning, IT Strategic Planning, IT Organizational Structure, IT Reporting, IT Budgeting, IT Investment Decisions, Steering committee, IT Prioritization Process and IT Reaction Capacity). It provides specific guidelines to help organizations formulating, implementing and monitoring their transformation strategies. IMFDS is articulated across 9 blocks (steps) and 34 processes.

No abstract

Despite the importance of the smart city concept, few works address how to define and implement smart cities in a clear manner. Furthermore, the smart city literature provides heterogeneous studies and solutions; this heterogeneity creates misunderstanding regarding the smart city definition and strategy. Moreover, stakeholders have multiple and conflicting interests and concerns, which also increase the ambiguity regarding the smart city concept and approach. To meet this challenge and fill this gap, a smart city frame of reference is needed to frame and guide smart city strategy formulation and implementation. In this perspective, the current research conducts a quantitative analysis of various smart city frameworks and strategies, in order to find and demonstrate the common building blocks of a smart city framework. Based on the quantitative analysis, this work proposes a clear and integrative smart city framework. This framework aims to reduce the misunderstanding and ambiguity regarding smart city definitions and strategies by providing a standard smart city approach that fits all smart city contexts. To this effect, the proposed framework considers all smart city concerns and it is composed of the following blocks: Strategic awareness, business strategic planning, IT investment decisions, IT organizational structure, steering committee, IT prioritization process, IT strategic planning, IT budgeting, marketing plan, IT reaction capacity, IT reporting and management strategy.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

To take advantage of information technologies, organizations need to define a clear strategy. Numerous works have provided definitions and phases of digital strategies. Some of these strategies are context-specific, while others deal with the common elements of digital strategies regardless of the digital transformation context. However, these works do not address a holistic approach. This raises ambiguity regarding digital strategy definitions and approaches. To eliminate this ambiguity, the current research tries to take advantage of existing digital strategies to propose a general digital strategy definition and build a general digital transformation approach. This work analyses various digital transformation strategies, to extract and classify their common elements in order to build a general approach that frame and drive the formulation of digital transformation strategies. To define such a general approach, the current paper analyses the effects of IT Governance and Management Strategy on the Digital Transformation Maturity. This analysis identified how IT Governance and Management Strategy can contribute to formulating a digital transformation strategy. Partial Least Square (PLS) was adopted in this research to develop an empirical evaluation for the case of 30 digital strategies and frameworks. Based on this empirical study several results have been presented in this work, namely: determination of a digital strategy definition and identification of a digital strategy approach.