By: Iqbal Santosa, Suhono Harso Supangkat, Arry Akhmad Arman
Many cities are competing to become smart cities by utilizing smart city services. Smart city services are services that collect information about the main functions of the city; and provide collected information as is or integrated, through smart city infrastructure, etc. Smart city concern on innovation –not necessarily based on the information and communications technologies (ICT)–, which aim to enhance urban performance in terms of people, governance, mobility, economy, environment and living. So smart city services can be ICT-based or non-ICT based that focus on improving the quality of life.
The ultimate goal for smart city initiatives is enhancing citizens’ quality of life and experience with city services. Quality of life (QoL) defined as an individual’s perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. So, all smart services that are developed (both in a city and in general) should help people improve their quality of life, according to the culture and value systems in which they live, and their relationship to goals, expectations, standards and concerns.
The general objective of this project is to evaluate whether a service or service offering will facilitate the outcomes desired by the consumers and therefore create value for them, by assessing the overall utility and warranty of the service. Utility means the functionality offered to meet human needs, while warranty means the assurance to meet agreed requirement. Both of them are required to realize service value. The value of smart services is co-created via interactions between the service provider and the consumer. So many studies have identified the functionality and delivery of smart city services, but no one has discussed them as a unity of value, an no one has linked them to the fulfillment of human needs, to improve the quality of life. This project contributes to both research and practice, providing researchers with the utility and warranty of some service cluster in fulfilling all aspect of human needs to improve the quality of life.
To identify the smart service mechanism that influence quality of life, we adopted a conceptual framework combined from Garuda Smart City Model – service view, ITIL Value of Services, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The service item in smart service hierarchy can generate value to improve the quality of life. As presented in Figure, resources that consist of people, governance, and infrastructure-technology-environment, become enablers to the smart city services. Each smart city service belongs to a specific service cluster, which is an instance of one of three service domains namely smart economy, smart society, and smart environment.
Smart city services should generate value, both in the form of utility and warranty which will then improve the quality of human life. The definition of service utility will adopt the hierarchy of human needs initiated by Maslow, which starts from fulfilling basic values including physiological needs and safety needs, then rises to additional values including social needs, esteem needs, until finally to self-actualization needs. So that each service item will be mapped to this hierarchy of needs, based on what has been implemented in recent years. Warranty typically addresses such areas as the availability of the service, its capacity, levels of security and continuity.