Design Principles for Strategic Alignment in Smart City Enterprise Architectures (SCEA)

Smart Cities are complex systems where digital innovations are applied to design enhanced city services and enable public value creation across various domains (e.g., mobility, energy and infrastructure, environment, and so). Such complexity challenges the alignment between city strategies with city services and underlying information systems, leading to providing services that may fail to achieve city goals and meet the needs of citizens. This paper defines a set of design principles to ensure strategic alignment in Smart City Enterprise Architectures (SCEA). The design principles were derived from the literature and validated by smart city domain experts, following a design-oriented research approach. The main contribution of this paper is the formulated design principles that deepen the knowledge of Enterprise Architecture design in the smart cities field. These design principles can be used by researchers and practitioners to guide the design of innovative digital services aligned with urban strategies.