Understanding the Relationships between Information Architectures and Business Models

With the development of Internet of things (IoT), there are many smart city projects for improving urban services recent years. Community is a basic subunit of a city, smart community involves those important affairs which most directly related to unban services in a smart city overall planning. Based on the dualism of information architecture and business model by Kuk and Janssen (2011), the study proposed a theoretical framework to understanding the relationship among IoT and smart community which regards a path of smart community development as a configurations set including both information architecture factors and business model patterns. To explore successful configurations based on the proposed framework, we select 69 communities from Beijing, China and deal with the case material of those communities by using the method of coding and scheme matching before analysis. Then, using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method, we found that a successful smart community depends on the integration between information architectures and business models, and different business model patterns rely on different information architecture factors.