Chapter by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos in Understanding Smart Cities: A Tool for Smart Government or an Industrial Trick: “Smart city and smart government appear to share a common scientific interest, since they structure corresponding research and practice terms like the “Web Applications and Smart Cities (AW4City)”, “The Smart Cities and Smart Government Research-Practice (SCSGRP) Consortium” and the “Beyond Bureaucracy”, while calls for mutual scientific tracks, workshops and articles can be located in several conference posts. This chapter analyzes the context of smart government. It performs a literature review on the term, where several conceptualization models are compared and explained. It is cleared that smart government is different to smart city government and to smart city. On the contrary, smart city can be seen as an area of practice for smart government, while smart governance is one of the smart city’s dimensions.
Moreover, the role of government is documented to be changed due to urbanization and technology. Urbanization results to communities, which are larger to nations and the role of local government is more complex compared to the usual national one. Moreover, technology provides governments with tools that has never got before, like the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which changes information collection and process flow, while it enables a direct and continuous connection with the community. Both these two phenomena highlight the government challenges of the forthcoming decades, which governments try to deal with data, process re-engineering, co-decision and service co-production….(More)”