Rules and responsibilities in smart city governance: Exploring the architecture of data value chain

Smart Cities increasingly rely on data, making the Data Value Chain (DVC), the processes of data acquisition, curation, analysis, storage, and usage, a core component of urban data architecture. Managing the DVC during digital transitions requires municipalities to develop capabilities that extend well beyond technology, including how they organize responsibilities, coordinate across units, and govern relationships with external partners. Through a qualitative case study of Pescara (Italy), a digitally advanced medium-sized city, we investigate how DVC is structured and how the local government leverages internal units and coordinates with external collaboration such as corporate, Semi-Public, SMEs and startups partner. Our findings indicate that effective DVC management requires a allocation of rules and responsibilities across organizational domains, and their alignment with internal–external actor roles at each DVC stage. This alignment must be supported by clear rules that safeguard data sovereignty, regulate access and usage rights, and assign accountability across inter-organizational collaborations. The study contributes to the smart-city literature by using a DVC lens to explain how organizational domains and actor configurations structure and coordinate data processes, showing how small and medium-sized cities operationalize data-driven transformation under resource constraints through bounded partnerships, role specialization, and the concentration of data-usage decision rights within the municipality.