REAL CORP is the renowned international and interdisciplinary annual conference to discuss the latest tasks and topics on urban planning, regional development and information society. It gathers about 150 experts from around the world from the fields of urban planning, smart cities, mobility and transport planning, information and communication technologies, architecture, social and environmental sciences, real estate, GIS, surveying and remote sensing and more. The conference has been organised since 1996 and one of its main activities is also publication of papers that you can view in the archive.
For the REAL CORP 2020, our SmartDevOps project partners submitted the paper ‘DevOps Competences for Smart City Administrators“, that has been published in the conference proceedings.
AUTHORS
- Prof. Dr. Hans Rüdiger Kaufmann, University of Applied Management Studies Mannheim, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Dolores Sanchez Bengoa, University of Applied Management Studies Mannheim, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Christoph Sandbrink, University of Applied Management Studies Mannheim, German
- Prof. Dr. Angeliki Kokkinaki, University of Nicosia, School of Business, Cyprus
- Prof. Dr. Achilles Kameas, Daisy Research Group, Greece
- Dr. Omiros Iatrellis, University of Thessaly, Greece
- Altheo Valentini, Centro Studi Di Foligno Associazione, Italy
ABSTRACT
A fledgling and still scattered knowledge stream on multi-disciplinary Smart city phenomena is developing. For the development of smart cities intellectual minds and a synthesis of quite diverse competences are required to shape cities to becoming smart with the overall objective to ever more improve the quality of life of its citizens in the most efficient and sustainable way. Both, the master minds and operators behind this development need to embark on an intensive change process, unlearn ingrained behavioral patterns and internalize an innovative competence set. This research is aiming to address the shortage of both, digital and transferrable skills that are needed for the various smart cities’ sectors differentiated by more strategic roles of Smart City Planner and Chief Digital Officer as well as the more operational IT Officer. This study addresses the gap of competences by providing preliminary quantitative and qualitative research findings of the still ongoing DevOps project.
In the paper, the authors propose an integrated software solution, which combines a cloud-based competence management system with ontology-driven learning pathways in order to handle the personalized training for smart city professionals in a holistic and homogenized manner. More specifically, the present research work has focused on achieving the following objectives:
- To facilitate, the dynamic creation of personalized and self-evolving learning pathways for the municipalities’ workforce in order to ensure an employee-centered adaptation of these pathways based on employee skill gap analysis by leveraging the potential of both semantic web technologies and well-known expert system approaches. An important attribute of the proposed approach is the fact that the reasoning phase is performed dynamically at each decision node of the training plan, in which new knowledge can be produced, thus creating an evolving framework which avoids the existing rigid modeling approaches for competence management.
- To create an extensible semantic model for the typical representation and modeling of the processes related to competence management not only inside a municipality but also outside of it in order to cover all the participating elements related with the smart city. The core of the semantic model is an ontology, which achieves formal representation of the set of entities involved in the skill gap analysis as well as the education provision process by leveraging the use of well-distinguished, consistent semantics.
- To design a set of smart applications and tools deployed in a community cloud model so as to ensure ease of use and unified ubiquitous access by the stakeholders engaged in the processes. The specific service model provides a cloud computing solution that can be shared by several municipalities that have similar concerns, goals and infrastructure requirements.
