Conceptualizing Smart Government: Interrelations and Reciprocities with Smart City

Abstract

Smart government (SG) is an emerging topic, which increasingly attracts attention from scholars who work in public administration, political, and information sciences. Smart city (SC) on the other hand, is an emerging and multidisciplinary domain of study. It is not clear whether the two terms SG and SC co-exist or concern different domains that interrelate and interact. The aim of this paper is to investigate the term SG; to conceptualize it with components; to define the importance of these components to the SG with their relative strengths; and to clarify its relationship with the SC term. In this respect, this paper follows a multi-method approach: a comprehensive literature review to define and conceptualize the SG, and determine its components, and a Delphi study for validating the literature findings and for calculating the relative components' strengths. The SG definitions that are in literature have several weaknesses and the authors proposed a definition to the SG that overcomes them, while a model with three rings, three dimensions and 13 components conceptualizes it. The Delphi study showed that all the SG conceptual entities are useful, and highlighted that Citizens Engagement, Economic Growth, and Accountability are more important compared to the others, but it is hard to decide about the less important component. Third, the ICT Innovation entity appears to be the most important compared to emerging technologies and data. Finally, SC and SG are indeed related but, SC is proved to be a complimentary part of the broader SG term. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.