مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد سیستم مبتنی بر دیدگاه برای حکومت اکوسیستم شهر هوشمند – امرالد 2018

Introduction

According to several managerial contributions, the twenty-first century is the era of technology innovation, information sharing and hyper-connected societies (Castells, 1999; 2010; Shaw, 2002; Karakas, 2009; Webster, 2014; Barile et al., 2015a, 2015b). All the traditional social and economic rules are progressively changing as a consequence of the fast evolutions in the challenging scenario in everyday life (Van Dijk, 2012; Del Giudice et al., 2016). The emerging balances are showing an increasing relevance of technology and information as relevant drivers on which companies, organisations and institutions should “act” to improve their performances and opportunities for survival (Davenport, 2013; Evangelista et al., 2016). The information is the new “key resource” for social and economic actors, and the information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer the instrument to better acquire, analyse and use it (Lopez-Nicolas and Meroño-Cerdán, 2009). Building upon these reflections, several managerial contributions have analysed the domain of information with the aim to better explain its dimensions (Miller, 1996; Garson, 2000; Siponen, 2001) and processes (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Applegate et al., 2007; Davenport, 2013) and several researchers have highlighted the role of ICTs in supporting the information acquisition (Mansell, 1999; Roberts, 2000) and sharing (Hendriks, 1999; Steinmueller, 2000; Caputo et al., 2016b). By following this approach, an increasing attention is emerging with reference to the topics of Smart Technology in terms of a “self-operative and corrective system that requires little or no human intervention” (Haque et al., 2013, p. 22); and of Big Data as “high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization” (Chen and Zhang, 2014, pp. 314-315). Despite the relevance of these topics, they define a perspective strictly focused on the technological and instrumental dimensions of society and really little attention is paid in reference to the role of the actors involved in the information building and sharing process (Cook and Das, 2004; Caputo et al., 2016a, 2016c; Perko and Ototsky, 2016). According to several contributions offered with reference to the domains of Smart Technologies and Big Data, society should be analysed and managed by building efficient digital platforms able to ensure better links among the many dimensions involved in social and economic processes (Uotila and Melkas, 2007). Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated than this (O’Connor, 1994; Espejo, 2015). As underlined by Bijker and others (2012), technologies can explain only a small part of the “social complexity”. In the same direction, Steinmueller (2000) underlines that information can only by partially decoded by using the technology because a large part of their meaning is embedded in human resources and they cannot be shared by simply using a technological platform. Johannessen and others (2001) outline that technologies are useful to improve the quality in management of more “tangible” dimensions of human life, but (for now) they are useless in understanding and managing cognitive and psychological variables. In accordance with all these contributions and embracing the interpretative perspective of social sciences, a relevant research question is required to be investigated: How do Smart Technologies and Big Data affect everyday life? With the aim to propose a possible answer to this question, the paper adopts the interpretative lens offered by the systems thinking and service logic to clarify the role of smart and digital environment in society life. An inductive approach is adopted to catch the relevant contributions that systems thinking can provided in understanding and managing some key concepts related to the domain of Smart Technologies, Big Data and Smart Cities. Accordingly, the research path has been structured by adopting a sequential approach in which the conceptual umbrella provided by systems thinking has been used to define a possible new interpretative path with reference to the role of Smart Technologies and Big Data and then, afterwards, discover ways to support the application of this new path with reference to the Smart Cities’ logics and dynamics. Reflections herein are contextualised with reference to the domain of the Smart City as relevant examples of contribution among social and technological dimensions. Finally, implications, conclusions and future directions for research are presented.