Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper presents an explorative case study to understand the drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of smartphone-based city management apps as e-governance tools in U.S. cities. E-governance refers to the process of engaging citizens and other non-government stakeholders in the co-production of public services. Using qualitative data from interviews with government officials and citizen focus groups in a southeastern city in the US, we systematically examine the facilitators and barriers from the perspectives of the government and citizens.

Our findings suggest that the city management app system was primarily adopted by the government to improve service efficiency through information integration and workflow automation on the backend, as suggested by the traditional e-government scholarship. It is viewed by both the government and citizens as an innovative two-way communication tool that encourages citizens to report service problems and facilitates service improvement. However, the app’s potentials of being an open dialogic and social space to engage citizens in a full range of co-production activities have not yet been sufficiently realized. To fully utilize the co-production benefits of this new technology, we find that smart city apps need to integrate features that allow more user control, involve localized solutions, and enhance community connection and socialization. In addition, process innovation is needed to incorporate these citizen feedbacks on smart city apps throughout the planning and implementation phases of smart city app initiatives.