Abstract

JOURNAL OF GLOBAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT 2021, VOL. 24, NO. 3, 227–228 BOOK REVIEW Demystifying Smart Cities: Practical Perspectives on How Cities can Leverage the Potential of New Technologies, by Lisdorf, Anders, New York, Springer Science, 2019, 232 pp. $39.99, ISBN 978-1-4842-5376-2 While there are numerous books on the impact of information technology (IT) on organizations, fewer books have focused on IT’s impact on cities across the globe. Cities can be considered macro- organizations; therefore, if implementing IT systems in an organization is complex, one can imagine how intricate the implementation is at the city level. In recent decades, air travel has shrunk the world by facilitating the movement of people and goods across the globe – and recent developments in technology and smart city planning will shrink the world even further. The concept of a smart city is based on a complex multidisciplinary approach to city planning that includes the internet of things (IoT), which promises instant interconnectivity between smart cities across the world. Much of the literature on smart cities is extremely technical and discusses the concept from an engineering perspective. For this reason, some people may feel intimidated by the complexity of smart city technology. However,