Identifying challenges and priorities for developing smart city initiatives and applications

The ubiquity of the technology and the availability of (open) data automatically collected in urban environments generate new opportunities, not only in tracking and managing public information services and resources, but also in the way we describe, implement and use these services. Although recent studies have proven that different smart city applications could improve some quality-of-life indicators by as much as 10–30 percent, at the same time it is reported that even the world cities that implement cutting-edge smart technologies are still at the beginning of their journey in a number of aspects. In an effort to identify and explore the challenges, the potential and the priorities for the implementation of smart city applications in a national/local context, a workshop followed by a research survey was conducted. To that end, a suitable research framework related to implementation of over 50 up-to-date smart city applications was adapted, extended and operationalized. The results of the study expose the strategic factors as the most challenging ones in the long-run in the national context of Croatia. In terms of local priorities for introducing smart city applications, the experts agreed on the most important and the least important smart city applications as well as on the potential to introduce these applications within 5 years. For the selection and prioritization of smart city applications in the given context, a proof-of-concept of a decision support tool intended for city managers is then proposed based on simulation modelling.