Creating Smart Governance: The key to radical ICT overhaul at the City of Munich

Around the end of the first decade in the 21st century, quite a few city governments in municipalities of various sizes began conducting so-called smart-city initiatives. While many of these initiatives have successfully reached for low-hanging fruits and easy wins when responding to the growing demand of smart online services, others have identified the need for fundamental change and overhaul with regard to organizational integration and alignment as well as interorganizational information system interoperability as a pre-requisite for creating smart operations and providing smart services. Sweepingly changing the governance over citywide information and communication technologies (ICTs) turned out to be at the core of creating an environment conducive to smart operations and smart services, and ultimately, smart city government. The City of Munich in Germany embarked on a fundamental overhaul of its ICT structures. The article describes the case and the challenges, insights, and workarounds in this multiyear change program, which ultimately led to the successful overhaul of the ICT governance model. In principle, Munich's approach might be transferable to other cases. At the very least, the case holds valuable lessons learned when engaging in smart government initiatives in practice.