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The aim of this research was to evaluate the new procurement practices of information and communication technology (ICT) services in Finnish-speaking schools in the City of Kauniainen. In the new model, schools define their needs and school administration mandates the procurement through tendering. The research included a review of the problems associated with procurement practices and the assessment of the procurement model. The results show that service levels have been improved and unit costs as well as the environmental load have been reduced. The new model requires the schools to have the skills and expertise to define their needs and the competencies to prepare and execute the procurement process. The case analysis of the Finnish “Dream School” in Kauniainen shows that administrative and governance aspects are equally important in successful deployment of technology.

Because of the use of digital technologies in smart cities, municipalities are increasingly facing issues related to urban data management and are seeking ways to exploit these huge amounts of data for the actualization of data driven services. However, only few studies discuss challenges related to data driven strategies in smart cities. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to present data driven approaches (architecture and model), for urban data management needed to improve smart city planning and design. The developed approaches depict how data can underpin sustainable urban development.

Design science research is adopted following a qualitative method to evaluate the architecture developed based on top-level design using a case data from workshops and interviews with experts involved in a smart city project.

The findings of this study from the evaluations indicate that the identified enablers are useful to support data driven services in smart cities and the developed architecture can be used to promote urban data management. More importantly, findings from this study provide guidelines to municipalities to improve data driven services for smart city planning and design.

Feedback as qualitative data from practitioners provided evidence on how data driven strategies can be achieved in smart cities. However, the model is not validated. Hence, quantitative data is needed to further validate the enablers that influence data driven services in smart city planning and design.

Findings from this study offer practical insights and real-life evidence to define data driven enablers in smart cities and suggest research propositions for future studies. Additionally, this study develops a real conceptualization of data driven method for municipalities to foster open data and digital service innovation for smart city development.

The main findings of this study suggest that data governance, interoperability, data security and risk assessment influence data driven services in smart cities. This study derives propositions based on the developed model that identifies enablers for actualization of data driven services for smart cities planning and design.

This study explores the enablers of data driven strategies in smart city and further developed an architecture and model that can be adopted by municipalities to structure their urban data initiatives for improving data driven services to make cities smarter. The developed model supports municipalities to manage data used from different sources to support the design of data driven services provided by different enterprises that collaborate in urban environment.

This paper aims to provide a theoretically grounded framework for designing and analysing business models for (mobile) information communication technology (ICT) services and systems.

The paper reviews the most topical literature on business modelling, as well as general strategic management, industrial economics and network economics literature, it also constructs a new integrated framework.

The study finds that business model design is interpreted as the (re)configuration of control parameters on the one hand, and value parameters on the other hand within a particular innovation system.

The paper is informed by a wide range of theories and approaches and proposes an improved and generally applicable framework.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative web-based eLearning platform called ICT-FLAG that provides e-assessment tools with general-purpose formative assessment services featuring learning analytics and gamification.

The paper reports on the technical development of the platform driven by the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing software methodology, which guides the platform construction, including the analysis and design steps.

The ICT-FLAG platform is technically tested by integrating it into a real e-assessment tool. Results are positive in terms of functional and non-functional aspects as well as user’s satisfaction on usability, emotional state, thus validating the platform as a valuable educational tool.

Because of the chosen technical paper as article type, validation of the impact of the ICT-FLAG platform in the learning process is not provided. Ongoing research with this platform is to measure the learning outcomes of its use in a real context of eLearning.

The paper shows implications of the main technical issues and challenges encountered during the integration of the ICT-FLAG platform with external eLearning tools, involving relevant aspects of interoperability, security, modularity, scalability, portability and so on.

This platform can fill the gap of many e-assessment systems, which currently do not have built-in analytical and gamification tools for learning, thus providing them with the experience to improve the quality of education and learning.

With globalization and knowledge‐based production, firms may cooperate on a global scale, outsource parts of their administrative or productive units and negate location altogether. The extremely low transaction costs of data, information and knowledge seem to invalidate the theory of agglomeration and the spatial clustering of firms, going back to the classical work by Alfred Weber and Alfred Marshall, who emphasized the microeconomic benefits of industrial collocation. This paper aims to argue against this view and show why the growth of knowledge societies will rather increase than decrease the relevance of location by creating knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs, due to sharing of tacit knowledge and research and development outputs. Designing epistemic landscapes of knowledge clusters and hubs is, therefore, proposed as a viable development policy.

Secondary data from cluster research as well as the authors' own survey data, mainly on Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, are used to show and measure clustering of knowledge‐producing organizations.

The paper shows that sharing of tacit knowledge is a crucial variable to explain why clustering of knowledge‐intensive industries takes place despite the development of information technology. The importance of knowledge management for development is highlighted.

Designing epistemic landscapes of knowledge clusters and hubs is, therefore, proposed as a viable development policy.

The paper argues against the mainstream of industrial clustering theory and proposes a KM‐based research strategy. The discussion of the difference between knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs enables the use of a new and consistent evaluation of a K4D (knowledge for development) strategy.

This paper aims to develop and evaluate, in “real-life” pilot applications, a framework for advanced social media exploitation by government agencies in their policy-making processes to promote public participation and conduct crowdsourcing.

This framework has been developed through cooperation with public sector employees experienced in public policy-making, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques: semi-structured focus group discussions, scenarios development and questionnaire surveys. The evaluation of the framework has been conducted through semi-structured focus group discussions with public sector employees involved in the pilot applications.

A framework has been developed for advanced social media exploitation by government agencies, which is based on the automated posting of policy-related content to multiple social media, and then retrieval and processing of citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes, comments and retweets), using the application programming interfaces (API) of these social media. Furthermore, a supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure and an application process model for it were developed. Its evaluation, based on “real-life” pilot applications, leads to useful insights concerning its capabilities, strengths and weaknesses.

The proposed framework has been evaluated in a small number of pilot applications, so further evaluation of it is required, in various types of government agencies and for different kinds of policy consultations.

The above framework enables government agencies to communicate with wider and more heterogeneous audiences in a short time and at a low cost, increase public participation in their policy-making processes, collect useful knowledge, ideas and opinions from citizens and, finally, design better, more socially rooted, balanced and realistic policies.

This research contributes to the development of knowledge concerning advanced practices for effective social media exploitation in government (which is currently limited, despite the considerable relevant knowledge developed in this area for the private sector), by developing and evaluating a framework for advanced and highly automated exploitation of multiple social media by government agencies. Furthermore, an evaluation methodology for such practices has been developed, which is based on sound theoretical foundations.

Cities have recognised information and communication technology (ICT) as a major enabler for transforming into “smarter” service providers. Mauritius is considering embarking on a smart island initiative, and as such, the existing towns in Mauritius have a major role to play in the transformation process. This study aims to focus on a systematic analysis of ICT architectures. This study proposes recommendations with regard to ICT infrastructures. This study elicits the contribution of those services towards the overall transformation of the towns, which in turn will form an integral part of the smart island initiative of the country.

A first step towards developing a smart ICT architecture is to understand what a smart ICT architecture constitutes of and the frameworks that can be used to develop these architectures. The main objectives of this systematic literature review (SLR) are as follows: understand what a smart ICT architecture consists of and derive a definition that will be used throughout the research for the development of ICT architecture for the smart local councils for Mauritius; analyse various frameworks, architectures and models that have been used in existing literature for the development of smart ICT architectures.

This SLR was conducted with a view to investigate ICT architectures with respect to smart governance. An in-depth review, followed by a critical analysis was performed based on the research questions set. The contribution of this study include the formulation of a definition for ICT architecture for smart local councils, which can be applied to any sphere characterised by similar aspects with reference to smart local governance. Albeit existing frameworks such as The Open Group Architecture Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture and Zachman Framework, it was observed that in most cases, ICT architectures were built from scratch potentially because of specificities of each country/city.

This work proposes ICT architectures for smart local council.

Business services have an important role in the development of global knowledge‐base economy. This is particularly clear in the field of ICT services where business customers are requiring an increasing amount of complex services in order to support their utilization of advanced ERP, SCM and CRM solutions for boosting their business processes and competitive advantage. The complexity of these services and customers' requests for special adaptations form a critical challenge for service providers. This paper seeks to develop solutions for managing this complexity.

Three service design and development methods – service industrialization, tangibilization, and service blueprinting – are introduced and then analyzed as to how they can be utilized as an integrated system to reduce the complexity of ICT services. This is carried out through an action research‐based case study of an ICT service provider.

The results include a service architecture framework, which can be used for creating a modularized offering and implementation system for complex business services. It reduces the complexity of services while allowing their customer specific adaptation.

Key aspects are the identification of service modules and interfaces in a multi‐actor service offering setting and the providing of adequate resources for the design phase of the customized service project. This is essential in order to be able to simultaneously respond to customer specific needs and to reduce the number of existing technologies and overlapping functionalities, seemingly contra dictionary aims.

Findings of the paper offer significant theoretical and managerial implications for the design and production of complex business services.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on “passive crowdsourcing” by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy.

This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews.

A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach has been developed, which is quite different from the one of the usual active crowdsourcing. Based on it, the functional architecture of the required supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure has been formulated, and then its technological architecture has been designed, addressing the conflicting requirements: low response time and, at the same time, provision of sufficiently “fresh” content for policymakers.

Taking into account that traditionally government agencies monitor what the press writes about them, our research provides a basis for extending efficiently these activities in the new electronic media world (e.g. newspapers websites, blogs and microblogs, online forums, etc.) to understand better the needs, issues, opinions, arguments and proposals raised by the society with respect to important domains of government activity and public policies.

The proposed approach provides a new channel for the “voice” of the society to be directly communicated to the government so that the latter can design its policies and activities based on the social needs and realities and not on oversimplified models and stereotypes.

Our paper proposes a novel approach to e-participation, which exploits the Web 2.0 social media – but in a quite different way from previous approaches – for conducting “passive crowdsourcing”, and elaborates it: it develops an application process model for it and also an ICT infrastructure for supporting it, which are quite different from the ones of the existing “active crowdsourcing” approaches.

This paper proposes an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform to increase the sustainability and resilience of smallholders to face supply chain disruptions in the event of COVID-like crises. The platform facilitates interactions between smallholders and buyers, workers and freight transport companies in agri-food ecosystems. Furthermore, this research work presents the implementation of the freight transport companies’ platform module.

The research work begins with a literature review aiming at analyzing current available ICT solutions supporting smallholders and other actors in the agri-food supply chain. This analysis identifies the research gaps which have to be filled by the platform. Then, the authors proceed with the analysis of the operational scenarios of each platform actor by interacting with experts and operators working in the agri-food sector. The results of such analysis resulted in a comprehensive, unambiguous and consistent set of specification being used to define the platform structure and modules architecture. The platform modules have been developed by using the web-application framework Laravel.

Preliminary tests show that the proposed platform is usable and promises to improve the resilience and economic, social and environmental sustainability of agri-food supply chains, with a focus on smallholders.

The research work allows players in the agri-food supply chain and in particular small local producers to react and mitigate the impact of COVID-like crises through development of a platform in which smallholders, citizens (buyers and workers) and freight transport companies are simultaneously present.