The role of ITIL in applying project management for smart cities service management

This paper explores the role of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework in project management procedures applied in smart city services. ITIL is a set of IT practices that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of the required organization and specific applications, especially in business contexts. Working on the ITIL and its flexibility, in this work a switch of the perspective from the business to the smart city context is provided highlighting the limits and benefits of integrating project management and service management through the ITIL framework in the smart city, going toward the Smart City Service Management (SCSM) approach. ITIL and project management can smartly identify and satisfy city services needs by looking at the different perspectives of multiple stakeholders, optimizing the system of problem detection, sharing the main reasonable proposal and building appropriate project management paths to achieve the expected goals for stakeholders' satisfaction following a value co-creation logic. The paper is a conceptual contribution that adopts the 'advocating' perspective (MacInnis, 2011) to explain the contribution of ITIL in supporting SCSM through project management.