Page 87 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

6 City IT Ecosystem

City core systems are the key elements that allow municipalities to support relationships
with citizens and administrative systems.

What are the principles of digital development? How do they help in developing cities?

City platforms are based mainly on international and national standards. These standards
have in common architecture based on layers, where the different capacities foreseen for
a city platform are grouped.

• What are the functionalities that an Urban City platform should have?
• What layers should be present to improve the integrated management of the city? What
are the enabling elements of the city's digital transformation that organizations should
have?

• What interoperability problems between systems and platforms can cities face? How
do you deal with interoperability between different Administrations?

• What are Building Blocks, and how can their technology help the agility and start-up
of the components? What technical requirements are needed for its implementation?

• What technologies offer a guide or model to build an integrated city or government
platform, taking advantage of implementing the Digital Public Goods (DPGs) model?

6.1 The IT Ecosystem

The reference technological architecture proposed in previous sections describes a long-term
objective model. Like other sectors of the industry, cities are immersed in a continuous transformation
of their information and communications systems to respond to the growing citizen demand for
more and better public services, transparency, and good governance, all in an environment of
increasing scarcity of resources.

The reality that municipalities face, in general, is that the systems on which the main administrative
and municipal operational procedures are based were designed ad hoc long ago in a model based
on self-contained applications, “silos”, which are not very flexible and do not meet new needs, and
whose adaptation requires significant economic and organizational efforts.

The pragmatic approach of many cities to this transformation has been to make legacy systems
coexist with new cloud-based solutions (private, on-site or public) building an architecture based on
microservices and containers. Unlike other industry sectors, public administrations have additional
regulatory requirements due to the nature of the information they manage. This may limit cloud

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