Official URL: https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rp/147

As the focal point of smart cities, city councils are increasingly institutionalizing Smart City Program Offices (SCPO) as an additional/overlay function within city authorities. These are emerging governance structures, working across city silos overseeing the implementation of new and emerging technology at a significantly increased level of scale and complexity. This structural change dictates the need for a triadic alignment incorporating the organization, the IT function and the SCPO. This IT Governance (ITG) challenge is underexplored in extant IS literature, and so is the area of ITG in the complex domain of smart cities. This paper presents an in-depth exploratory case study of ITG implementation in smart cities within a European city council. The findings of this case study contribute to the emerging and underexplored topic of ITG in smart cities, and more broadly, to the academic debate on ITG in the public sector.