scritaadmin, Author at Enterprise Architecture Management for Smart Cities

Acknowledgements & Copyright

Acknowledgements

This project has been supported with the financial support of the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software (www.lero.ie).

We would like to thank the following institutions for their assistance and collaboration:

Limerick City and County Council, Ireland
Netanya Municipality, Israel
Ariel University, Israel

We would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance and contributions:

Professor Iris Reychav, Department of Industrial Engineering & Management, Ariel University, Israel
Beatrice Heneghan, Head of Information Systems Mayo County Council, Ireland
Antti Knutas, Department of Software Engineering, LUT University, Finland
Zaher Hinbarji, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland

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Footfall-Counter Service

The footfall-counter service represents a public service of River City which aims to collect the number of people in various places of a city in order to improve the environments of the city.

The current state of this city service indicates that there is a data integration issue due to the lack of a common data format. Each user downloads the information from diverse sources with different data formats what causes information silos. Information is not adequately shared but rather remains stored within each system. The stakeholders of the smart city do not perceive the real value of the information collected through this city service and the intelligent decision making is not supported properly.

Vision

Digital Transformation of Public Services with Enterprise Architecture

The digitalization of public administration presents significant challenge for many municipalities. At the same time, many larger cities have well progressed towards applying Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to develop modern urban spaces, commonly referred to as Smart Cities. Smart Cities are complex systems whereby ICT plays an essential role to address the needs of many stakeholders. Obviously public services are key for the development. However many municipalities and cities face challenges to transform and digitalize these services. Although single projects are often successful, the coordination and coherence of services, the consideration of many stakeholders together with strategic alignment is complex.

On tool for assisting the digital transformation in the public sector is Enterprise Architecture (EA). Numerous researchers describe concepts and frameworks for EA, and emphasize its benefits. EA frameworks, concept and modelling approaches aim to support efficiency gains while ensuring business innovation and strategic alignment. Indeed alignment of various views and aspects is one of the key drivers for EA approaches. Organizations may use EA frameworks to manage system complexity and align business and ICT resources within an enterprise.

Thus, we develop a Reference Methodology to support digital transformation in the public sector. Our Methodology assist to consider, organize and describe the various elements, stakeholders’ views, goals, considerations, factors and components, and IT applications as well as constraints by facilitating the transformation and digitalization of public services. Visit our Methodology.

Lero Annual Summit, Athlone, Ireland

The Lero Summit took place in Athlone last year in Sep 2019. All members of the Lero team across the centre’s nine higher-education institute partners were invited. There were different sessions organised for all the members, and one of the most exciting session was about the communicating your research. Many lero members participated in it and it was interesting to know different reserach projects across various universities and how to communicate research effectively.

Architecting the Enterprise with Agility & Resilience, Maynooth, Ireland

A workshop entitled with “Architecting the Enterprise with Agility and Resilience – What is the future of Enterprise Architecture?” was conducted on Wednesday Feb 19th 2020 at Maynooth University. The aim of the workshop was to look towards 2025 on the intersection between EA and digital transformation. Where the participants discussed the practice of EA within enterprises and modern software architectural patterns to support digital transformation.

It brought together a small group of experts and leaders that first contemplated the problems and constraints for creating modern enterprise and software architectures followed by the elaboration of strategies and action tasks.

Link for the event:
https://ivi.ie/agile-architecture/

The Open Group Event, Dublin, Ireland

Prof Markus Helfert and Dr Zohreh Pourzolfaghar presented the Reference Methodology for Developing and Transforming Public Services at the Open Group Dublin Event. They presented how Enterprise Architecture Management can be applied in Smart Cities context to provide the services that citizens need, based on the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM).

Digital Business Research Day (DBRD), Linz, Austria

The third international Digital Business Research Day (2018) was held at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz. The conference provided a platform for researchers and students to present their research in progress and to discuss pressing issues. Example issues are: how to publish research results in high quality outlets, how to position research and research contributions, how to apply research methods, or how to structure and systematically plan a good PhD-thesis.

Link for the event:
http://www.digital-business.at/dbrd2018/

Digital Business Research Day (DBRD), Limerick, Ireland

The second Digital Business Research Day (2017) was held at Lero, Limerick, Ireland. Researchers from the Business Informatics Group (BIG) at the Dublin City University (DCU) organized the event at Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre – at the University of Limerick. The conference team consisted of experienced researchers and professors, providing an opportunity for discussion of research projects in an academically stimulating atmosphere. Moreover, the Digital Business Research Day provides multiple networking opportunities, embedded into a friendly atmosphere.

Link for the event:
https://dcu.lero.ie/DBRD2-2017/

Digital Business Research Day (DBRD), Steyr, Austria

The first Digital Business Research Day (2017) was held at the University of Applied Science Upper Austria, Campus Steyr. The main purpose of the event was to provide a forum were researchers of the involved organisations, particularly doctoral students, could present their current research, get some feedback from the researchers and exchange their experiences. In total, seven doctoral students from different stages in their doctoral research projects presented their current work.

Viviana Bastida, Mouzhi Ge and Zohreh Pourzolfaghar presented their research work on smart cities as outlined below,

Viviana Bastidas: A Requirements Framework for the Design of Smart City Reference Architecture
Mouzhi Ge: Recommender Systems in Smart City
Zohreh Pourzolfaghar: Developing a Taxonomy for Designing Smart Services

Healthcare Service

This conceptual example describes the River City initiative with regard to the healthcare service as follows. Figure 1 shows that to provide better patient care to the citizens of River City, the system uses IoT to provide data to the connected hospitals, which in turn will provide information to the hospital staff.

The smart city manager plans to improve the usage of data in order to improve the services provided by the hospitals to the citizens, therefore, he has decided to implement a smart health initiative in the city.

To implement this idea, the data manager of the project needs to understand the requirements, such as:

What services will be provided
What data is necessary for each service
What are the necessary steps to process the relevant data
What are the stakeholders involved

In order to address the requirements above, the data manager has decided to use a data lifecycle, which is a framework that contains the stages/activities that data has to go through from its creation to disposal. With the framework, the manager will be able to know what data will be collected, what are the requirements to process it and relevant stakeholders involved, therefore to ensure that data is collected and prepared for the intended usage and end users.

His main concerns related to architecture issues are:

How to design service as per the given requirement
How to process data and be in compliance with the relevant regulations
How to integrate the different platforms and technologies

Citizens are the final users of the services. They concern about specific issues, such as (i) having a smooth hospital experience (ii) receive effective diagnosis and treatment.