A Proposal for Hybrid Agile Approach during Procurement Process of Smart City Solutions

Smart city is a concept widely used and sometimes the idea seems somehow utopian since it involves notions from a multitude of scientific fields. Most researchers, representatives of companies and government agencies, together with city dwellers agree that the main elements of the smart city are ICT, their successful application and smart human resources. However, it seems that local governments do not pay much attention to educating citizens or raising society's awareness of smart solutions when trying to develop smart cities. Rather, we believe that the major interest in introducing smart city solutions has been an economic one, which would support increasing revenues to local budgets or increasing sales revenues for companies that develop smart solutions. We therefore believe that the demands and expectations of citizens must be listened to (more), frequent result-oriented discussions with smart solutions providers need to take place and that local authorities must establish a clear action plan for all stakeholders to communicate in order to create a smart city that works with success. Therefore, among the characteristics of agile methodologies usually implemented in software development we identified in the current study some concepts that might be applicable to the process of public procurement of smart city solutions. We thus propose a new hybrid agile approach and discuss its advantages with regards to smart city projects. Conclusions of the study indicate that the proposed approach requires changes in public management and, even more important, in our thinking. Customers, typically in the form of municipality or governmental organizations, need to become pro-active and much more engaged in smart city projects. As a result, it is demonstrated that smart governance plays an essential role in the success of the urban projects implemented with such solutions.