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

Abstract

Around the end of the first decade in the 21 st 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. When Microsoft ended the support for Windows NT 4.0 in late 2003, with its some 18,000 desktop workstations the City of Munich made a dramatic decision in disfavor of migrating to the then next version of the proprietary Windows platform (Windows XP). Despite a dramatic personal onsite en- gagement of Microsoft's then CEO Steve Balmer who attempted to make the City cancel its decision with a blend of cajoling and coercing, Munich's elected officials were unimpressed and stayed course in their decision to walk away from proprietary platforms and rather migrate to an open source-based (Linux) platform for their servers and desktops. The City of Munich's move made headlines around the world, since such an attempt to escape the proprietary path dependencyand vendor lock-in had been un- heard of before, since the inevitable switching cost were (and still are by many) considered prohibitive. While for the vast majority of the City's systems the migration ultimately took exactly a decade to com- plete at overall cost by and large as projected, the City government's elected officials, senior appointed officials along with the City's ICT leadership had entered an uncharted territory, in which they felt capa- ble of building the City's future ICT landscape. However, when the migration to Linux began in 2006, it quickly became obviousthat an even deeperand more fundamentaloverhaulof organizationalstructures