Smart cities have been studied for many years, but smart homes and the citizens' actual living in these smart homes are less researched. We argue that for digital government research, and for governments to be successful in smart city development in practice, it is necessary not only to understand living on a societal level, but also living aspects in the narrow context of homes. Citizens populate the smart city and are the ones who are supposed to use the services provided by the government. In this article we explore and analyze digital and analogue services in smart homes developed in a new city district. We have conducted observational studies in 53 apartments during an urban living expo which we analyze by applying a set of socio-technical design principles. The research question that guides the analysis is: “What tensions between values in digital and analogue services for a smart living can be revealed by a socio-technical perspective?”. We identify five tensions between: 1) being in control and being controlled, 2) intended and undesirable use of personal data, 3) digital and analogue smartness, 4) smart home visions and practices, and 5) environmental and social sustainability. By revealing these tensions, we contribute to an understanding of the complexity of smart living. We also contribute by highlighting the importance of applying a perspective that captures both technology and citizen and user issues (i.e., social aspects) when developing services in the smart home context.

In this paper, we present three current research projects that explore how digital transformation can be a positive force to help address the causes and mitigate the consequences of climate change. Drawing on the Scandinavian approach to information systems (IS), we advocate a stakeholder-centric approach that can help inform the climate change discourse and assist in developing green digital practices and services. Finally, we propose a research agenda stating that green IS researchers need to engage in co-creative collaborative research and that green IS research should focus on normative design theory, design principles, and actual designs.

This reflection note is part of the special section focused on smart cities. The note puts contemporary smart city research into a societal context and elaborates on the role of a Scandinavian perspective in this domain. The authors reflect upon how Information Systems Research can contribute to smart city research and what additional value a Scandinavian perspective can bring. The note is focused on two topics: 1) participation and involvement, and 2) privacy and security.

User participation is seen as an important enabler for successful public e-service development. However, at the same time development of public e-services is still often characterised by an internal government perspective with little consideration for external users’ perspectives. This paper challenges the overly positive attitude that is surrounding user participation in e-government research. The paper aims to illustrate and problematize various aspects that influence why, how, and in whose interest user participation is conducted in public e-service development. First, via a literature review, we identify a set of dimensions for critically exploring how, why, and in whose interest user participation is conducted in public e-service development projects. Second, we use these dimensions in order to characterise and analyse three empirical public e-service development cases in order to test the utility, usefulness, and feasibility of the identified dimensions. Our findings highlight the importance of questioning and elaborating on the motives behind user participation (the why) in public e-service development. We also identify two basic forms of how user participation is addressed in public e-service development projects: 1) veneered participation, and 2) ad-hoc participation. Furthermore, we argue that any decisions made regarding user participation in public e-service development should be based on conscious and informed choices concerning why user participation is needed and what it may bring for different stakeholders and their interests.

Many of today's city planning projects aim to realize smart city ambitions. In order to plan and build a smart city district, where ICT is integrated in critical infrastructure and used to control and govern city functions in innovative ways, new ways of working in city planning are needed. The purpose of this article is to develop a framework that takes into account stakeholders and smartness dimensions in city planning. We have studied a city district development in Sweden where a new planning approach was implemented. The developed framework was used to analyze the complexity of this city planning process. By defining which smartness dimension each stakeholder primarily focus on and analyzing the consequences of this, the framework pinpoints each stakeholder's contribution and/or hindrance to the process and outcome. A recommendation from this study is that new stakeholder groups are important to involve in smart city planning, but this also adds complexity that must be acknowledged when setting up this kind of projects. The developed framework can be useful when organizing and staffing city planning processes as well as when evaluating project outcomes.

Working with an integrated management system (IMS) is a challenging task. In public organizations, the formalization of an IMS including the communication of control mechanisms, rules, goals and culture are crucial. Several types of carriers are used in order to communicate the content in an IMS – both human actors and artefacts. An artefact studied in this paper is an intranet, as one carrier of the IMS. The purpose of this paper is to explore how institutional theory – focusing institutional carriers – can help us to understand how an IMS is represented through human actors and technology in a government agency. The conclusion is that the application of an institutional carrier perspective on an IMS can help us to understand the past and present, the role, and the relative success of such a system. An IMS can be aligned or misaligned related to three dimensions of structure, process and people. Achieving an aligned and legitimate IMS is crucial in order to achieve goals in an organization. The implications of this study are that further research and practice should give more attention to institutional carriers when studying and improving IMS.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyse and understand the contemporary management of electronic identification (e-ID) development to: identify and formulate challenges and reflect upon the use of a combination of perspectives. To generate knowledge on this issue, we investigate e-ID development in Sweden from: an e-government systems development lifecycle perspective and a project challenge and critical success factor (CSF) perspective. Design/methodology/approach– This is a qualitative case study covering an analysis of the three years in a larger project focusing e-ID in a public e-service setting. Empirical sources have been face-to-face interviews; official documents and different kind of forums for presentations and discussions in, for example, hearings arranged by authorities; meetings with the coordinating agency, and practitioners’ networks events. Findings– This study concludes that there are significant challenges involved in managing e-ID development because of its contextual and integrated character. Challenges involve the organization and management of the program and can be traced back to e-government, general project management literature and theory on path dependency. Based on this study, we can question, e.g. governance models, centralization and a narrow focus on the technical artefact. Our study is also an illustration of a possible way to analyse e-ID within an e-government initiative. Research limitations/implications– The present study shows that an e-ID can be considered as a back office-enabler for launching e-services, but also highlights the need for management of the artefact as an integral part of e-service development because it is intertwined with the use of e-services from a user perspective. This aspect together with the insights related to challenges and success factors including path dependency provides implications for future practice of e-ID management and development in particular and information systems artefact development in general. Originality/value– This paper addresses challenges related to the development of e-ID in a public e-service setting. Few studies have theoretically combined a lifecycle perspective on challenges and success factors related to e-ID development while also focusing different dimensions of path dependency as an example of a challenging area within a program frame. Studying e-ID as a contemporary phenomenon from a contextual perspective in line with sociomaterial thinking – with a focus on the interplay between technology and people –can also help us to understand and discuss artefact development in general.

E-service development has grown to become a daily practice in most public organizations as a means for realizing digital agendas and e-government initiatives on different levels (local, regional, national and transnational governmental levels). Public e-service development is often an inter-organizational (IO) effort with multiple actors and organizations involved in the multi-faceted dimensions of design, development and delivery decisions. Still, there is a lack of research focusing on IO public e-service development practices in particular. In order to address this lack we elaborate on reported challenges and their implications for IO public e-service development in practice. By returning to two empirical cases of IO public e-service development, the IO dimension is evolved. Our purpose is to highlight challenges in IO public e-service development with implications for research and practice. Findings are presented as eight emerging lessons learned from an inside-out perspective related to phases in IO public e-service development processes.

This paper reports from a pilot study conducted in an ongoing research project focusing on how users and their needs are being part of the development of smart grid services. The project aims to explore how development and use of services related to smart grids in homes might affect practices involving electricity consumption. The empirical material centers around an urban development project with a focus on social sustainability. So far only preliminary remarks can be made, and these points to that smart grid services are not in the center of attention, but rather taken for granted, and that the users are rather absent from the discussions. This indicates that the practices of which electricity consumption are part are not taken into consideration, but instead it is taken for granted that users shall adjust their needs based on information about electricity consumption patterns and prices.

In this paper, we approach the field of critical success factors (CSF) by analyzing a successful case of IT implementation within the public health sector. The purpose of the paper is to gain further understanding of if and how well CSFs can explain a successful case. The main conclusion drawn is that even though the studied organization shows signs of common CSFs, this alone cannot explain the success. An important contribution from this study is thus the focus on contextual factors when trying to understand what makes an implementation project successful.