Urban IoT solutions and Smart Cities are exciting research areas and it bears historical potential for the Information Systems (IS) discipline to demonstrate their relevance. Urban IoT solutions and Smart Cities deal with the design, use and impact of information systems in our everyday working and living environment, so they affect the quality of both life and work for all of us. The shift towards a more multidisciplinary perspective on the IoT & Smart City discourse signals the journey of technological solutions towards becoming integral part of every aspect of our society. As a consequence, there is a growing need to provide more meaningful IT solutions incorporating the needs of the urban society. This is where contributions from IS research are needed in order to study and design urban IoT solutions and smart systems from a socio-technical systems perspective. At the same time IS research needs to partner up with colleagues from other disciplines, such as Science Technology & Society, Architecture and Design, Geography and Anthropology, just to name a few.

Discussions around urban socio-economic development and quality of life have for long placed technology in the centre of attention, (Zinam, 1989). IoT and Smart city challenges therefore represent contemporary urban and social challenges. Building on early iterations of the Smart City definitions, urban information systems encompass more than just pieces of technology. They refer to a way of thinking, acting and organizing in the contemporary urban society. Not surprisingly, we put great hope and investments into IoT and Smart City initiatives. We expect nothing less from a city that engages in such initiatives, than dramatically increasing the pace at which a city can improve its value proposition to society and economy, the integration between its services, as well as ‘its sustainability and resilience by fundamentally improving how it engages society, how it applies collaborative leadership methods, how it works across disciplines and city systems, and how it uses data and integrated technologies, in order to transform services and quality of life to those in and involved with the city’ (The International Organisation for Standardisation’s Smart City definition, 2015).

Despite its importance, IS research on urban IoT and Smart Cities is still fairly scarce. This Pre-ICIS Workshop, therefore, intends to foster research on IoT and Smart Cities, and to push the discourse to a next level, opening up to a new episode of IoT and Smart Cities that takes a socio-technical perspective on innovating and improving our working and living environment, which we believe is exciting and of high relevance for both practice and the field.

See http://iot-smartcities.lero.ie/isca-2016/ for more details:-