Smart governance as key to multi-jurisdictional smart city initiatives: The case of the eCityGov Alliance

Abstract

French

Quite a number of smart-city initiatives from around the world have been analyzed and documented, and a growing body of academic knowledge is evolving around the phenomenon of the smart city. Smart-city government is seen as an important driver for developing a smart urban environment. The eCityGov Alliance in the Pacific Northwest of the USA represents a special case of a successful smart-city collaboration between nine neighboring municipalities, which combined forces to provide smart services to citizens and businesses that no single municipality could have provided alone. Developing and maintaining a collaborative governance model appears as the most important key success factor in such multi-jurisdictional smart-city undertakings. This study investigates the governance model of the eCityGov Alliance and its opportunities, and potential pitfalls. It concludes that the eCityGov Alliance can serve as a role model for such multi-jurisdictional smart-city initiatives.

Keywords

collaborative governance cross-jurisdictional services lean governance structures process streamlining resource pooling and leverage smart services vendor influence and pressure

Introduction

The term ‘smart city’ refers to the intelligent use and leverage of information and communication technology (ICT) to make an urban environment more attractive, livable, sustainable and competitive, besides other dimensions indicating urban smartness (Chourabi et al., 2012). Local governments can play major roles in creating smart urban spaces, for example by making available modern and effective public administration and comprehensive online services based on novel ICTs (Scholl & AlAwadhi, 2015; Scholl & Scholl, 2014). These services encompass informational exchanges such as the provision of comprehensive public information (open government), access to legislative proceedings of elected bodies, service schedules, hazard and other alerts, as well as transactional exchanges such as permit applications, license renewals, fee and tax payments, among others (Nahon & Scholl, 2010; Washburn et al., 2010). However, while online local government services and internal process streamlining have helped municipalities contain and even cut costs, the squeezing of public budgets due to reduced tax revenues has remained a huge challenge for local administrators when it comes to the development and continued provision of modern online services and internal overhaul (Scholl et al., 2014). Faced with this backdrop, local governments have been forced to look at ways to overcome the effects of budget trimming while at the same time meeting the ever-higher expectations of citizens and businesses for modern online services (AlAwadhi et al., 2012; AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013).

As a consequence, on state and local government levels, pooling agreements have been introduced, for example in the area of public procurement (Department of Enterprise Services, 2014), which enable state and local governments to take advantage of their combined purchasing power (eCityGov, 2014b). While public-sector pool procurement helps contain initial cost of goods and services purchased, it has little effect when novel online services need to be developed and, in particular, when commercial off-the-shelf systems (COTS) are unavailable or do not provide the expected quality or functionality for online services.

Local governments have, therefore, looked at other ways to make the most of their scarce means and assets, and resource pooling has been proposed and practiced as another appropriate response (LeRoux et al., 2010). However, when it comes to creating smart governmental services, resource pooling requires a critical mass of government-internal ICT capacity and expertise on the part of the pooling partners. Without own ICT expertise and skills, local governments would have to rely on COTS vendors, who are highly unenthusiastic about government pooling to say the least. Yet, unlike the pooling of fixed assets such as snowplows or car fleets, the teaming of ICT assets and ICT resources instantiates a more complicated undertaking because it requires ongoing efforts in terms of maintenance and further development, for which detailed arrangements and continuing commitments are indispensable. Despite the potential advantages that resource pooling can provide to partnering governments, such arrangements can also pose long-term challenges since, with political leadership changing over time, political orientations and priorities may also change, and this could weaken or even derail the collaborative effort.

To achieve better understanding, this study investigates the governance model of a unique case of a multi-jurisdictional smart-city initiative, namely the eCityGov Alliance, a case of collaboration between local governments with the aim of developing a smart inter-governmental service structure. In this context, governance refers to power sharing, coordination and various patterns of decision-making in a dynamic environment where both knowledge and power are distributed (Allen et al., 2001).

The Alliance was formed by municipalities in the metropolitan area around Seattle, in King County, Washington State. The area is known for its innovative spirit, a highly educated population of some 2 million, widespread technology savviness and a multi-cultural mindset. Amazon.com, Boeing, Expedia, Microsoft, Starbucks and the University of Washington are globally active players that are located in this area, along with large portions of their respective networks. Nine municipalities, mainly on the east side of Lake Washington (Bellevue, Bothell, Issaquah, Kenmore, Kirkland, Mercer Island, Sammamish, Snoqualmie, and Woodinville), formed the Alliance in early 2002. By 2005, the Alliance serviced 15 municipalities as well as the county, reaching a population of about 900,000; and only eight years later, the service had been extended to 35 government entities and served 1.7 million people. Between its inception and the year 2013, the Alliance had nearly quadrupled the number of entities served and doubled the population covered (eCityGov, 2014a).

The remainder of this article is organized as follows: First, we review the smart city-related literature. Then, we present our research questions and describe the methodology used, followed by the presentation of our case findings. Next, we discuss the findings, and finally we conclude that the eCityGov Alliance and its governance structure provide a role model for small and mid-size jurisdictions when ICT resources are pooled with the aim of developing smart administrations with smart services to citizens and businesses.

Literature review

The interconnected phenomena of the smart city (as an urban environment) and smart-city government have been studied from various standpoints such as economy, governance, education, mobility, quality of life and environment (Caragliu et al., 2009; Giffinger & Gudrun, 2010; Hollands, 2008; Nam & Pardo, 2011). Other studies have focused on variables such as human capital, urban density, the industry mix, amenities, attractiveness (Caragliu et al., 2009) and the emergence of the so-called ‘Triple Helix’ of intertwined university–industry–government interactions (Etzkowitz, 2003, 2011). Furthermore, smart-city initiatives were related to the development and sustainability of technology clusters of universities, social networks, labor-market mobility, as well as competency formation within new-technology firms (Casper, 2013) and the acknowledgement of horizontal and global interdependencies between cities (Urquhart et al., 2010). In a joint effort of several research groups from around the world, a comprehensive eight-dimensional framework was developed and presented (AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Chourabi et al., 2012), which has since guided systematic empirical research, amounting to a double-digit number of studies on the two interconnected smart-city phenomena (for example, AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013; Scholl & AlAwadhi, 2015; Scholl & Scholl, 2014; Scholl et al., 2014) among others. The framework encompasses eight dimensions: (1) management and organization; (2) technology; (3) policy; (4) governance; (5) people and communities; (6) economy; (7) built infrastructures; and (8) the natural environment (Chourabi et al., 2012).

Based on the framework, a definition of the programmatic term ‘smart city’ has been given as the ‘creation, integration, combination, development, and effective leverage of resources and assets toward innovation, attractiveness, competitiveness, sustainability, and livability of an urban space facilitated and accelerated by the ubiquitous use of advanced information and communication technologies with local governments playing key instigating roles in this process’ (Scholl & AlAwadhi, 2015: 2).

In a cross-case comparison of smart-city government initiatives in Philadelphia, Seattle, Quebec and Mexico, it was found that, despite budget cuts and financial constraints, the initiatives thrived by using novel technology platforms such as social media and mobile technologies along with traditional formats such as portals and high-speed networks to improve transparency, service levels, internal collaboration among government agencies as well as people engagement (AlAwadhi et al., 2012). With regard to the benefits of smart-city projects, AlAwadhi and Scholl found that the most prominent benefits were seen in the improvement of services, cost savings, efficiency gains, energy conservation and information sharing and integration (AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013). Similarly, in another study, efficiency gains, process streamlining, cost savings, service improvements, and information sharing and integration were found to be the most salient benefits (Scholl et al., 2014). This is consistent with the benefits found in smart-city projects. A study by Deakin (2012) revealed that ‘communities of practice’ were touted as potential providers of smart services, emphasizing a strong participatory element. While these exploratory studies found quite some variance among approaches and foci, another comparative study found ‘convergence’ of cities in the cases of nine mid-size European cities (Kourtit et al., 2012).

In the context of the eCityGov Alliance case, the literature on shared public services needs to be considered as well. Cost pressures, for example, have pushed governments to seek and create service arrangements which help pool government-internal resources into shared services (Becker et al. 2009; Janssen & Joha, 2006; Niehaves & Krause, 2010). While such shared services represent a hybrid sourcing mechanism that combines the advantages of insourcing and outsourcing (Becker et al., 2009; Janssen & Joha, 2007; Ulbrich, 2010), they also produce economies of scope and scale (Joha & Janssen, 2010), although in contrast to the eCityGov Alliance, traditional shared services have their main foci set on serving government-internal constituencies. Yet shared government services might have the capacity to produce smart-city outcomes along the lines of the definition of the programmatic term cited above.

Apparently smart government also rests on a model of smart governance (Scholl & Scholl, 2014). The authors investigated models of smart governance and found it to require revised norms of public budgeting and spending, sustainability and adaptability-oriented policies, dissemination of knowledge on successful smart practices, rapid information sharing in general, high-caliber and high-capacity ICTs, in addition to frequent updating of human skill sets. On the other hand, smart policy-making and governance have to address the potential tension between requirements of urban sustainability, and economic attractiveness and competitiveness (Herrschel, 2013). Economic attractiveness, however, appears to trump sustainability and livability (Lombardi et al., 2012).

In summary, over recent years, the interconnected phenomena of smart city and smart- city government have been the object of attention from a wide variety of researchers. The concepts and practices of smart-city initiatives have attracted interest from both academics and practitioners, who have become aware of the importance of such initiatives to the development of societies. With the development and introduction of the Smart City Framework, a comprehensive conceptual instrument was devised which has been used in a number of exploratory studies into the subject matter. It is worth noting that findings from early studies have provided rich explanations of smart-city initiatives in practice, added understanding of choices and issues, and shown a wide variety of approaches and outcomes. Since studies based on the Smart City Framework have so far mainly focused on a single city, there is a need for more case studies as well as for studies on collaborative efforts to provide a large enough sample for comparative analysis that allows for the potential identification of patterns and other potentially pervasive issues.

Research questions and methodology

Research objectives and questions

As seen before, most smart city-related studies either compared cities and their efforts on an aggregate level of analysis, or were focused on a single city. Federated efforts like the eCityGov Alliance have not been studied with regard to their drivers and challenges (in particular, with regard to challenges to the necessary governance model and its sustainability), nor have the outcomes of collaborative and federated efforts been academically investigated. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to investigate the governance model of a multi-jurisdictional smart city initiative and to contribute to the knowledge of the smart city. This led to the following first research question:

Research question 1 (RQ#1): How do municipalities form sustainable federations/alliances that serve their respective smart-government needs, and what challenges/opportunities have to be addressed in the course of building and maintaining a federation/alliance?

In order to identify further clues of potential limitations and opportunities of the federated approach, we juxtapose the eCityGov Alliance case with two single-city cases studied separately: the City of Seattle, Washington, and the City of Munich, Germany (AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013; AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Scholl et al., 2014), rather than offering a comprehensive analysis of similarities and differences between a federated approach to creating and operating smart services as opposed to a single-city approach to the same end. This led to the second research question:

Research Question 2 (RQ#2): How do federated smart-city service approaches juxtapose to single city smart service approaches?

Methodology

As pointed out before, with this case study our intention is to add to the growing number of case studies conducted on the basis of the Smart City Framework to further build and develop theory on what makes urban environments (and their city governments) smart, and what characteristics, opportunities, and challenges smart-city projects might be confronted with in practice. The single case of the eCityGov Alliance represents a critical case of its kind and has been selected for its information richness (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Ruddin, 2006).

Instrument and coding scheme

A unified semi-structured interview instrument (Patton, 2002; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was developed based on the eight-dimensional Smart City Framework (Chourabi et al., 2012), which has been used in this case study without any modifications. An initial coding scheme was devised ex ante from the instrument and the previous case study (Gorman et al., 1997). It was also expected that additional concepts would be encountered during data collection and analysis. Therefore, the instrument, and in particular the coding scheme, was open to alterations and extensions (Glaser, 1999; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Urquhart et al., 2010). Consequently, a hybrid approach (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2008) to coding was adopted in this study. The coding scheme was used and further developed in both interview-transcript analysis and Alliance document analysis.

Sample

The sample was purposive (Ritchie et al., 2003) and included the city managers of three participating cities, the information technology leadership of two cities and of the Alliance as well as several other representatives from the Alliance board. We also included official Alliance documents and the Alliance website in our data sample. In total, we conducted eight interviews within a period of nine months.

Data collection

Interviews were conducted in person and lasted between 58 and 80 minutes. All interviews were audio-taped, transcribed and coded by at least two coders for analysis. During the interviews notes were taken, and participant interaction was observed and recorded. Similarly, some 30 Alliance documents were collected, reviewed and coded as appropriate. Furthermore, the Alliance’s web portal was reviewed and assessed.

Data analysis and coding

In total, 151 codes and subcodes were used for coding the data, 131 of which were derived ex ante from extant theory (the Smart City Framework (Chourabi et al., 2012)) as well as previous studies, while 20 codes were derived from the data (open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998)). The codes were pre-clustered into 11 groups of categories (general information, defining smart city, project description, management and organization, technology, governance, people and communities, policy, economy, natural environment and built infrastructure, the latter eight of which correspond to the Smart City Framework, (Chourabi et al., 2012)). Independently, both researchers and a research associate coded the transcripts using a cloud-based software tool for qualitative and mixed-method data analysis (Dedoose 4.12.14). The coded data were compared one by one, and demonstrated high inter-rater reliability.

For this study, the clusters (main categories) of general information, defining smart city, and project description, governance and policy were analyzed. After the initial hybrid coding, an axial coding process was applied during which the converged main categories/clusters and subcategories were further analyzed regarding their inherent structures and processes, leading to paradigms whose internal relationships were identified wherever possible (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Results

How municipalities form sustainable smart-city federations/alliances (ad RQ#1)

As shown elsewhere (Scholl & AlAwadhi, 2015) and mentioned earlier, among the main incentives and motivations for pooling resources in local smart-government projects, ongoing budget squeezes play a major role, as do the heightened service expectations of businesses and citizens. In other words, the material and measurable needs (Burton, 1990; Fisher, 1990; Galtung, 1980; Lederer et al., 1980; Ramsay, 1992) that local governments have provide a strong basis for pursuing resource pooling and for establishing arrangements of the eCityGov Alliance type. The question then is: Why is the eCityGov Alliance a rather rare instance of such arrangements, and what makes it more difficult for other municipalities to engage in pooling and resource-sharing arrangements like the eCityGov Alliance?

Hard and soft prerequisites for pooling resources and collaboration

When asked particularly for the initial steps and considerations that led to forming the Alliance, interviewees consistently expressed that a certain tradition of collaboration over a number of single projects had developed among the founding partners long before the Alliance was formed. In other words, many city managers and their staff from various departments had already known each other personally over some extended period of time and had developed rapport and trust. Moreover, the successful collaborative projects at the grassroots levels created a host of positive experiences and a solid know-how basis regarding the practicalities of inter-governmental collaborations. This was further reinforced by the growing understanding that many problems the various municipalities faced were highly similar, and that remedies and solutions that suited one local government would in all likelihood also suit other municipalities as well. As one interviewee put it,

And, what happened is you started to create a relationship, you started connecting, because you have things in common and you start solving some small problems together and suddenly you start building some momentum up to the point where we said, you know, let’s think big. We heard about a smart permit system and things going down in Silicon Valley and we hopped on a plane together and went down there and toured five different cities that are in this smart permit system they were trying to launch down there that didn’t succeed. So, the relationship piece was really important. It moved into this kind of more structured collaboration where we started having agendas and bringing more people. (Quote #01)

Another important aspect in this evolution toward a formal arrangement was the attractiveness of cross-boundary services for important business stakeholders such as builders and developers, who had an interest in pursuing projects and investments that span several jurisdictions in close geographical proximity in an affluent and densely populated area. These stakeholders found it burdensome to deal with different procedures and regulations on a fairly small square mileage, which disincentivized investment and development, thus putting the area at a disadvantage compared to other locations.

Finally, the State of Washington had created a legal framework (Revised Code of Washington 39.34, Interlocal Cooperation Act of 1967), which allows local governments to cooperate and form interlocal government agencies such as the eCityGov Alliance, which was formed in 2002 under the provisions of this legal framework. The leaders of the collaborating municipalities understood that a formal agreement was an indispensable prerequisite for a sustainable and lasting interlocal collaboration in that it tied the partners formally to dependable governance and ownership structure, thus shielding them against the risk of sudden disintegration in situations of disagreement, for example, over the scale and scope of the evolving collaboration.

Main elements of the eCityGov Alliance governance model

The model of governance, which the original nine (and as of March 2014, eight) partners (or ‘principals’) chose can best be characterized as a not-for-profit government federation (or alliance) with the purpose of jointly developing, maintaining and providing online services and information to the public via coordinated portals (eCityGov, 2014b). The eCityGov Alliance distinguishes between partners, who have full voting rights, and service subscribers, who use one or multiple services for a fee and do not have voting rights. The partners were of disparate sizes in terms of their respective populations, ranging from 132,100 (Bellevue) and 81,730 (Kirkland) to far smaller ones of 21,170 (Kenmore) and 11,700 (Snoqualmie) (see also Table 1).

Table 1.

eCityGov Alliance population numbers and services (2013) (eCityGov, 2014d).

eCityGov Alliance partners and subscribers	Population	My building permit	My parks and recreation	NW property	NW maps	Shared procurement portal	Gov Jobs tool
Bellevue	132,100	X	X	X	X	X	X
Bothell	34,460	X	X	X	X	X
Issaquah	32,130	X	X	X	X	X	X
Kenmore	21,170	X	X	X	X	X	X
Kirkland	81,730	X	X	X	X	X	X
Mercer Island	22,720	X	X	X	X	X	X
Sammamish	48,060	X	X	X	X	X	X
Snoqualmie	11,700	X	X	X	X	X	X
Burien	48,030	X
Capitol Hill Housing	NA					X
Cascade Water Alliance	NA					X
Covington	18,100			X
Des Moines	29,730			X
East Pierce County Fire District	NA					X
Everett	104,200			X
Jefferson Transit	NA					X
King County Library System	NA					X
Mill Creek	18,600	X
Mountlake Terrace	20,160			X
Mukilteo	20,440			X
Newcastle	10,640	X
NORCOM	NA					X	X
North Bend	6,020			X
Oak Harbor	22,080						X
Pacific Hospital Preservation & Development Authority	NA					X
Redmond	55,840					X	X
Renton	95,540	X				X
Sammamish Plateau Water & Sewer District	NA					X
SeaTac	27,310			X
Shoreline	53,670			X	X	X
Snohomish County	730,500	X
Tukwila	19,160			X	X
Woodinville	10,990	X				X	X
Woodinville Fire & Life Safety District	NA					X	X
Total partner services		8	8	8	8	8	7
Total subscriber services		6	0	9	2	13	5
Total partner population	384,070
Total partner and subscriber populations	1,675,080

Note: eCityGov Alliance partners (top eight rows/shaded); eCityGov Alliance service subscribers (alternating shaded rows/not shaded).

The Alliance agreed on a number of principles such as equitable cost and risk sharing, innovation orientation, business needs orientation, maintained local autonomy and control, and transparent decision-making. The partners also agreed that decisions should typically be made by consensus. As the governing body of the Alliance, an executive board was established in which each partner has one seat and one vote regardless of population size. The board seats have to be filled by the partnering municipalities’ city managers, mayors or city administrators. The executive board elects a chair and vice-chair from its own ranks, and office terms have to be rotated every two years.

According to the agreement, non-consensual decisions can be made by simple majority; however, a mechanism of weighted majority votes (in terms of population shares) and supermajority votes is also incorporated into the agreement, so that smaller partners in terms of population cannot overrule the larger partners. As the bylaws state, a ‘“Supermajority Vote” means the affirmative vote of not less than sixty-six percent (66%) of the total Weighted Votes of the Executive Board, and not less than sixty-six percent (66%) of the total number of the Executive Board Members’ (eCityGov, 2014c). Such a supermajority vote is needed, for example, to (a) adopt new (operating) bylaws; (b) admit new partners; (c) add new programs or services; (d) appoint or dismiss the Alliance’s executive director; (e) change cost allocations; (f) amend the Alliance agreement; or (g) dissolve the Alliance, among others (eCityGov, 2014b).

The executive board also approves the Alliance’s budget, which is prepared and proposed by the executive director, that is, the chief operations officer of the Alliance, who is appointed by the executive board. Furthermore, the executive board determines the staffing of the Alliance organization, which can result in any combination of loaned staff from partners, direct hires to the Alliance or contract workers and consultants. Finally, the executive board reviews the so-called program work plans, which are developed by dedicated program committees staffed by Alliance partners. The work plans determine what is actually done within the respective programs in budget cycles of two years. The partnering municipalities staff the program committees, which are operationally coordinated by the operations board and the executive director of the Alliance.

While the Alliance’s executive board focuses on strategic planning, policies, operating principles and overall directions, sets the budget and approves the related project work plan of the Alliance, the executive director together with the operations board handle daily routine operations. The operations board comprises one representative from each partner who ‘have broad authority within their organization to coordinate internally and represent their agency on Operations Board matters’ (eCityGov, 2014c: 9). The municipalities’ representatives on the operations board are typically either the chief operations managers and/or the chief information officers/IT managers.

A pivotal role in making the Alliance function falls to the executive director, who is expected to ‘have experience in technical, financial, and administrative fields’ (eCityGov, 2014b: 13). As an appointee of the executive board, the executive director prepares the budget proposal, and administers and coordinates the Alliance’s daily operations; he or she also appoints individuals to staff positions. The executive director is further chartered with negotiating contracts with potential subscribers and other third parties. For all budget-relevant decisions such as hiring and contracting, the executive director needs to seek explicit executive board approval.

Decision processes and conflict resolution in practice

While the higher-level strategic and directional decisions are made by the executive board in a fairly formal fashion (eCityGov, 2014b), decision-making in the various program committees and also the decision processes involving the operations board and the executive director are less formally structured. The committees seek decisions by consensus as a matter of course. Reaching consensus can take time and effort, and the informal process for reaching agreements appears to be an important element. One interviewee described the process this way:

I’ve observed at committees, we’ve asked our project managers to drive decision-making in committees, not to make them but to drive the process and I would say the decision-making in the business teams and in the tech teams although they may not agree with this, I would say that they actually do a pretty good job, especially when it’s laid out in the proper way. You know, you can talk about it for this amount of time but at the end we need to make a decision. (Quote #02)

The non-hierarchical consensus model and the moderating decision-making process appear to be essential for maintaining stability and commitment from all partners in a federation of unequal participants in terms of size and resourcefulness. The program committees appear to be the locus where most practical and technical decisions are made, including decisions regarding task priorities, resource allocation and technical feasibility. In the event that prioritization cannot be established via consensus, the program committee can bring the conflict before the operations board and the executive director or, in the event of disagreement at that level, also before the executive board.

In cases of persistent disagreement, which were reported to be very rare, the mechanism of voting has been used for conflict resolution and decision-making. Yet, the population-proportional formula never had to be invoked in such decisions. As one interviewee said:

It’s never come down to that. We did end up with four [applications], in the last budget process, which when we went through the business case for each of the applications, for some of the smaller applications, cities have either chosen not to use them, or they have some other product that they have put in, and that they like better, and so there was this whole issue around why should we keep paying for this whole portfolio when we’re only using seven of the nine, for example. And so, after the business case, after each application then was discussed, there was a vote, literally a vote, or do we keep it, or do we drop it? And there were one or two applications I think where a couple of cities said, ‘Drop it!’ And it was just majority. And it was clear majority. There was no reason to get into the population that would ultimately have governed that decision. (Quote #03)

Partner profiles matter

While size and resources matter in terms of potential contribution to federated efforts and organization, the municipalities’ respective governance structures seem to matter even more. Whereas some municipalities are governed by an elected city council, which appoints a city manager or city administrator to manage the administration and its various departments and agencies in a top-down fashion (we refer to this as ‘city governance model A’), other municipalities have adopted a governance model that incorporates a much higher degree of division of powers. For example, cities might have governance structures which incorporate separately elected officials such as a mayor, a council and even elected heads of departments or agencies (we refer to this as ‘city governance model B’).

In the eCityGov Alliance, all partnering municipalities are governed under city governance model A, with a city manager appointed by the city council except for the City of Snoqualmie, which is governed according to city governance model B, with separately elected mayor and council members. In 2009, the City of Renton (also governed under model B with a mayor), with a population of some 95,540, joined the Alliance as a partner. However, this partnership only held for some four years until the City of Renton withdrew from full partnership and converted back to subscriber status with only two Alliance programs in use. As one interviewee from a model B partner put it to illustrate the tensions that can arise when pursuing or maintaining full partnership:

Because we’re also trying to accommodate everybody, and we recognize everybody’s got budget issues, so it wouldn’t make sense if I just spent half a million dollars on an HR system, a year later now in order to be in the groove with the Alliance I have to spend another 300 grand, justifying that to the Council is tough. So yeah, ‘tell you what guys, you go ahead, and I’ll hang out and stick with my individual system and then four or five years from now I’ll take a look and see if I want to join, or if there’s something else.’ In the meantime the market’s gone through four iterations and there’s now a better one, much better one out there that I think I want to go to. (Quote #04)

In fact, when city governance model B partners join a federation like the Alliance, then factually several partners join, and keeping them aligned among themselves and also with the federation at all times might be far more challenging than when dealing with a partner of the more monolithic partner structure of governance model A. Separately elected officials (mayor, council, agency and department heads) may be inclined to push their own political agendas, which might not be in line with the Alliance agenda. In particular, if such ‘multi-pronged’ partners have a certain legacy of investments in similar services and programs, the incentive to change these programs and platforms in order to become part of a larger bandwagon appears far less attractive than for municipalities without such legacies and investments, which not only include fixed assets, but also investments in human resources, expertise and know-how.

But the City of Renton was not the only one to convert from partnership back to subscriber status at the end of calendar year 2013: the City of Woodinville, a governance model A partner, which traditionally had been the smallest of all Alliance founding partners, with a population of a little under 11,000, took the same route to subscriber status. In this case, the City officials could no longer identify the benefits versus the costs of being a full partner. After this change, the City of Woodinville continued to subscribe to three of seven Alliance programs (see Table 1).

How federated smart-city service approaches compare to single-city smart-service approaches (ad RQ#2)

In this section we do not intend to and cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of similarities and differences between a federated approach to creating and operating smart services as opposed to a single-city approach to the same end. However, we juxtapose the eCityGov Alliance case with two single-city cases studied separately with the aim of deriving clues for potential limitations and opportunities of either approach. The two single cities studied separately before are the City of Seattle, Washington, and the City of Munich, Germany (AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013; AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Scholl et al., 2014). Briefly, Seattle is a coastal seaport city in the US Pacific Northwest, with a population of some 650,000. It has been described as modern, progressive, innovative, and a technology center hosting companies and manufacturers that are leaders in their respective high-technology fields, such as Amazon, Boeing and Microsoft. With the stream of new software, biotechnology and internet companies, the city government is providing excellent economic and social conditions that meet the ambitions and aspirations of its stakeholders. Munich is situated in the south of Germany, with a population of some 1.4 million. The city is the seat of the State government of Bavaria. Major global corporations such as Allianz, BMW, Munich Re and Siemens are headquartered in Munich. The city is the major hub for high technologies in Germany. The city government has chartered itself with matching and instigating the ambitions and aspirations of its constituents by embarking on continuous administrative and infrastructural modernization. As indicated, the two single-city cases have been presented and analyzed separately in previous publications (AlAwadhi & Scholl, 2013; AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Scholl et al., 2014).

Services and programs

At the time of this writing, the eCityGov Alliance operates six online services (see Table 1) whereas the City of Seattle has more than two dozen online transactional services in operation (AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Aldama-Nalda et al., 2012; Scholl et al., 2014). The City of Munich, however, although it has a number of online services in operation, has taken a different approach to smart services, which is more radical than those of both the eCityGov Alliance and Seattle. The City of Munich has engaged in a decade-long fundamental overhaul of its entire ICT infrastructure and its ICT governance structure, resulting in a comprehensive institutional architecture as a prerequisite to providing smart services (Scholl et al., 2014; Scholl HJ et al., 2015).

In terms of evolution of online transactional services, their number has remained stable for several years in the eCityGov Alliance, whereas in the City of Seattle transactional online services have steadily grown. The online services offered by the City of Munich are limited mainly to investigations regarding transaction or case status (for example for passport or ID card). Complete online transaction processing, such as in MyBuildingPermit.com or its equivalents in the City of Seattle are still lacking in the City of Munich. All three entities provide comprehensive informational services to citizens and businesses via their web portals.

Governance models

As seen in the results section regarding RQ#01, the eCityGov Alliance represents a federation of diverse partners united and converging toward the common purpose of providing online transactional and information services. Unlike the Alliance, which operates on the basis of a coordinated strategic plan for its various programs (present and future), the City of Seattle has not developed any explicit and integrated plan for providing online transactional and informational services; rather the various departments and agencies have contributed independently toward a fairly comprehensive online presence of the city. Seattle’s Department of Information Technology, which provides quite a number of services itself, including the maintenance and further development of the city portal, also has certain oversight privileges with regard to setting norms and standards for city online services provided by other city departments and agencies. Nevertheless the kind of online services provided is within the purview of the respective department or agency.

In the case of the City of Munich, a strategic plan was developed and executed in several incremental steps. As mentioned, the city opted in favor of a comprehensive institutional architecture that encompassed the vast majority of city departments and agencies. ICT services in city departments and agencies used to be highly decentralized and self-directed. As a result, in addition to serious incompatibilities, the City had built over the years numerous redundancies and inefficiencies into its overall ICT infrastructure. Services were scattered and online delivery modes mostly non-existent. In order to ready the City of Munich for the digital age, a so-called ‘Three Houses’ approach was formally instituted via city ordinances and implemented accordingly: it encompassed (1) a central strategic unit with far-reaching directional and governing powers that helped coordinate all ICT activities City wide; (2) an ICT service entity with the capability of developing applications and providing services; and (3) departmental ICT units, which serve the respective needs of their units. The overhaul of the ICT landscape and the resulting realignment of the ICT resources at Munich City Government took almost a decade to complete. It involved the inclusion and active participation of stakeholders from all affected entities in view of the formulation and enactment of a set of common goals (Scholl et al., 2014; Scholl HJ et al., 2015).

Discussion

Model transferability

When assessing the case of the eCityGov Alliance for its relative transferability (Guba, 1981), it first has to be noted that the Alliance was formed at a historical point in time that may have been highly conducive to such an endeavor. The nine neighboring municipalities already had accumulated positive experiences of working together on smaller and less complex projects, and many of the leaders and their staff had known and appreciated each other for some time. Furthermore the strongest partner (City of Bellevue) had a lot to offer in terms of financial power, infrastructure, applications and skilled workforce, in particular in the critical area of ICTs, which made the larger joint effort more feasible and more likely to be successful.

Furthermore no long-standing legacies in terms of internet-based ICT applications had developed yet, and, hence, the partners were still fairly path independent in terms of their online services. On this basis, the various leaders were able and managed to develop the political will to engage in a mutually beneficial federation dedicated to jointly providing internet-based applications for improving and extending municipal services. The question then becomes, whether or not, or rather to what extent, the model is transferable to other municipalities.

Over the years, the so-called Eastside municipalities, that is, the municipalities located east of the City of Seattle on the eastern shores of Lake Washington that formed the Alliance in 2002, had evolved into a densely populated and economically as well as culturally integrated metropolitan area. Citizens and businesses regularly worked across several jurisdictional borders so that harmonized and integrated government services were in high demand.

In other words, geographical proximity and a relatively strong de facto integration of urban and suburban environments (economically and otherwise) appear to be important elements for forming successful service-oriented federations such as the eCityGov Alliance. The number of subscriptions for Alliance applications seems to be the lower the larger the geographical distance between the core of eight partners and the subscribers, the fact of which may not be coincidental. In any case, the maximum number of subscriptions from non-partners to Alliance services is three, that is, just 50% of all available Alliance services.

From the legal side, forming a purpose-oriented federation as the model of governance for an endeavor such as the Alliance, which strongly relies on consensus-based decision-making and the proportional pooling of resources, appears to be highly transferable to other cases and circumstances. So, in light of our findings and despite some historical uniqueness, we submit that the eCityGov Alliance can serve as a viable model for other collaborative efforts of a similar kind. However it might be necessary first to build a working relationship and a trail of positive collaborative experience on the basis of smaller projects. In addition past investments and resulting legacies and past dependencies might present a barrier to joining forces.

Ongoing challenges for federations

Collaborative efforts based on interlocal agreements can meet some challenges of their own over time. Despite an initially strong sense of common interests, when facing problems that appear similar if not common, and the resulting willingness to collaborate and pool resources, jointly developed and provided programs and services lead to certain outcomes. Among these outcomes are the perceived costs versus the perceived benefits from the collaborative efforts. Most services that the Alliance developed over time can also be sourced from commercial vendors. Commercial vendors in turn have little economic interest in seeing collaborative efforts such as the Alliance’s thrive; on the contrary. So, when looking at the cost-to-benefit ratio (c/b ratio) the Alliance partners have to convince themselves individually and collectively that they still provide a substantially superior c/b ratio than if they went with commercial service applications. Vendors, in turn, will try to target partners with proposals in terms of price and service performance that might look superior to the Alliance alternative.

In other words, as long as the homegrown solutions remain competitive in terms of c/b ratios, state-of-the-art functionalities and user satisfaction, Alliance partners can absorb and counterbalance the economic (and sometimes ideological) pressures from commercial vendors. Maintaining superior Alliance services can also be fostered through community and stakeholder involvement. In the case of MyBuildingPermit.com, builders and construction companies actively involved themselves in helping develop the application to an extent and level of functionality that exactly matched the needs of both the private-sector stakeholders and the Alliance partners. Moreover, the builder and construction community readily agreed to higher service fees for greatly improved online services. Also, subscription fees shield the Alliance from losing steam on continuous service improvement efforts. Combined, a favorable perceived c/b ratio for Alliance services, the community involvement that helps cover service needs, subscription revenues from Alliance services and the perceived competitiveness of homegrown services have led to an increased willingness on part of the Alliance partners to hold on to and further invest in the joined programs.

However, as the case of the City of Renton shows, the alignment of own interests with Alliance interests can become a challenge. As described above, the City of Renton joined the Alliance as a full partner in 2009 and went back to subscriber status only four years later. As pointed out before, the difference in the model of city governance, with separately elected mayor and council (city governance model B), played and still plays an important role, since city administrations and their various departments headed by a separately elected mayor have greater autonomy than city administrations under model A (under which the majority of Alliance partners are governed). Unlike appointed city managers, elected mayors may pursue different political aims from the respective city council, and vice versa. This can make the participation in long-term collaborative undertakings very complicated, since model B partners need to sustain a shared perspective on the usefulness and effectiveness of the collaboration, which might be difficult to retain over multiple election cycles in the heat of fluctuating political aspirations.

This situation can be further complicated in case of ICT legacies. Not only do they create path dependencies leading to high switching costs when embarking on a new system, but the replacement of an existing system by a new system can and most likely will obliterate previous investments in terms of human skills and application expertise as well. So even if an Alliance service were more functional and less expensive, it would still have to overcome resistance on grounds other than costs versus benefits.

If commercial vendors had provided such departmental programs under consideration for replacement, the element of counter-pressure from those interest groups would add to the overall resistance. Vendors would praise the competitive advantage of their commercial solutions over other applications and would also give other incentives (price, product improvement outlooks) to maintain or regain their contract position with the prospective Alliance partner.

Critical mass: Single-city versus multi-city approaches

Increasingly, city governments seem to embrace the notion that ICTs have to be seen, developed and maintained as (internal) core competencies of effective and smart-city governments since they are of strategic importance and are mission critical (Scholl et al., 2014; Scholl et al., 2015). That is, except for specialty applications, the main services have to be built and maintained internally by city ICT units; or, if developed by and purchased from a commercial vendor, the application source code needs to be turned over for further maintenance by the city-internal ICT units. This perspective marks a sharp departure from the notions of the ‘hollow state’ (Milward, 1994; Milward & Provan, 1993) and government’s role as ‘steering’ rather than ‘rowing’ (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). This turn appears to be owed to the two-decades-long experience of rising and frequently uncontrollable costs of COTS and increased vendor dependency.

However, ICT self-sufficiency requires a critical mass of resources, which limits the choices a smaller municipality might have. Clearly, resourceful municipalities such as Seattle, Munich and even Bellevue can afford to have their in-house ICT departments and COTS vendor independence for their mission-critical systems. In the case of the City of Munich, the desire for vendor independence even went as far as phasing out proprietary platforms such as Windows for mission-critical systems and replacing them with Linux-based systems (Scholl et al., 2014; Scholl HJ et al., 2015).

Smaller municipalities thus have the choice of either using COTS leading to dependencies on private interests, or forming collaborative alliances that pool and leverage their resources. When taking the example of the eCityGov Alliance, it appears essential that at least one partner brings to the table at the outset the critical mass along with a sophisticated ICT infrastructure and the respective human skills base. The smaller municipalities can then complement the leading partner’s resources, which in turn can be mutually beneficial. As a consequence, partners in a federation like the eCityGov Alliance become increasingly interdependent and path dependent. However they have more control over their own destiny (and, ultimately, the public good) than when contracting individually with commercial vendors, who have tremendous leverage, at least over small municipalities. Along these lines, it is both interesting and revealing that commercial vendors consistently refuse to engage in pool agreements for their COTS with smaller municipalities (Scholl & AlAwadhi, 2015).

Needs-theory-based considerations

Chevalier once distinguished the need-theoretical dimensions of ‘calculable’ (hence pre-determinable) and ‘incalculable’ (therefore, not pre-determinable) when discussing the decision-making process in public administration (Chevalier, 1980). In his logic sequence of ‘self-regulating’ decision-making (from incalculable toward calculable): (1) the development of functions of a government unit are widely defined based on the goals of its respective constituency of interest; (2) objectives are determined in terms of available resources; (3) programs are designed per integration of government resources into the constituency’s resource allocation process; and, finally, (4) actions are taken by delivering government resources to the constituency integrated with other activities directed toward the constituency (Chevalier, 1980: 337). Chevalier termed this holistic needs-based approach management-by-interest as opposed to then popular management-by objective (Chevalier, 1980).

Despite the challenges discussed above when assessing the eCityGov Alliance approach, it seems to resemble Chevalier’s vision of a holistic approach to government decision-making, which focuses on the needs of its constituencies in the first place, and makes functional and resource allocation decisions on the basis of this understanding of needs (cf. also, Ramsay, 1992). In this logic, integration of services is essential to serve the needs; integration of services, however, requires a maximum of control over services and resources, which can be accomplished through pooling and leveraging of resources and efforts. When looking from this angle, the decision to form and maintain a federation such as the eCityGov Alliance appears logical and consequential. It certainly set these municipalities on a path that gives them maximum control over their own services.

Limitations, future research directions and conclusion

Studies of a single case such as the eCityGov Alliance have their inherent limitations. Rather than targeting generalizability of results, they are interested in the hows and whys of a specific case, which might help detect the potential for transferability of insights from this case to other cases (Yin, 2014). In so doing, they help develop theory that can then guide further investigations.

This study is part of a larger research endeavor, which employs the Smart City Framework as its theoretical framework (AlAwadhi et al., 2012; Chourabi et al., 2012). More than a dozen cases have been studied, all of which used the framework. At a later stage, the cases will be subjected to a cross-case analysis, which it is hoped will yield significant insights informing academic theory and practice about the various aspects, opportunities and challenges of smart-city initiatives.

The object of the present study was to investigate the governance model of a multi-jurisdictional smart-city initiative, the eCityGov Alliance, with the aim of uncovering how municipalities form collaborative undertakings in order to provide their constituencies with smart government services. In particular, the details of the federated governance model, the decision processes and conflict resolution mechanisms were analyzed. It was found that partner profiles matter less in terms of size but more in terms of their own governance structures and their compatibility. Juxtaposed with single-city cases, the services of the Alliance appeared as more focused and oriented along the lines of common needs and problems. Federated undertakings require a critical mass of resources and services. The sustainability of municipal collaboration hinges upon a number of factors, including political will and leadership support, shared vision and commonality of interests, a formal agreement that governs the collaboration, program committees requiring the active participation of ICT and business professionals from all partner municipalities, competitiveness of homegrown services with COTS and revenues from subscriptions. Legacies in terms of existing applications and systems or separate programs can become powerful competitors of collaborative efforts. However, the eCityGov Alliance can be viewed as a poster child for successful interlocal government collaborations. Its approach has a noteworthy potential for transferability to interlocal collaborations elsewhere.

Future research will therefore try to identify other Alliance-type public-sector undertakings geared to providing external smart-city services so as to assess the effectiveness and sustainability of such arrangements. While resource-sharing models have played a major role in providing internal government services, the extent to which external services can be provided and further developed on an ongoing basis still needs to be better understood.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleague Professor Elsa Negre of LAMSADE Université Paris Dauphine, France, for helping us with the translation of the abstract and keywords.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biographies

Hans Jochen Scholl is a tenured professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, which has been ranked one of the top schools of its kind worldwide. His research expertise is focused on information management. Special topics of interest include smart government and smart governance, process analysis, interoperability, information artifact evaluation as well as disaster information management using novel information technologies. He is an Associate Editor of the Government Information Quarterly, the leading journal in electronic government. He chairs or co-chairs e-government conferences, such as the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) E-Government Conference, as well as the globally leading E-Government Track and E-Government Symposium at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Dr. Scholl is the Chair (2013–17) of the IFIP TC3 WG 8.5 (Information Systems and Public Administration) and is a past president of the Digital Government Society (2010–11).

Suha AlAwadhi is an assistant professor in the Department of Library and Information Science in the College of Social Sciences at Kuwait University (Kuwait). She obtained her PhD from Loughborough University in 2007. Her research areas of interest include e-government, smart cities, information literacy, professional development, knowledge sharing and social networking. She is a member of the Digital Government Society of North America (DGSNA); a member of the program committee for the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) E-Government Conference; and served as a co-chair for the Social Networking and Government Minitrack at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) for several years. Dr AlAwadhi has a number of publications including conference papers and journal articles; and has delivered many presentations, workshops and lectures.

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