# A Methodological Approach for the Smartification of a University Campus: The Smart ESI Use Case
## 5 Discussion  
The review of related works completed in Section 2 suggests the need for a more rigorous and adequate vision for the evaluation of the smartification process, in any smart domain, that contributes to enriching the current state of the art: unlike the works presented in [9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30], which describe a variety of smart university initiatives, emphasizing either the digital transformation of content or processes, or the design of the smart university as a smart city, or from a purely technological perspective, our work presents a case study based on the smart ESI project and, additionally, a formal method of measuring its degree of transformation, i.e., its smartification. On the other hand, works describing smartification approaches, such as those described in [8; 22; 23], lack methodology, so we can argue that they are difficult to systematically exploit in other contexts. Our work described in [2], which presents a formal method to develop rankings for smart cities, is similar to this work as both leverage MADM for the description of the theoretical framework but lack in-depth analysis related to the domain of smart universities that includes, for example, academic indicators. The work described in [25] proposes a methodology for smartification of buildings, without providing evidence or demonstrations of its application in real-life scenarios. The proposed methodology has as its main objective to estimate a value \(\mathcal{G}\) of the effort performed by a university/campus to become a smart university, i.e., vapor to measure the smartification process. It is important to note that such value should be understood in the context of the demonstration of the proposed methodology, not as an absolute result of its application. More importantly, the outcome of this research is oriented to understand better the strengths and weaknesses of the smartification process by focusing our attention on technological aspects without detracting from the academic and research and aspects, which make up the fundamental mission of universities. We have considered seven dimensions that are commonly employed in the different initiatives related to smart universities/campuses that we have found in the state of the art, such as explained in Section 2: Smart Learning, Governance, Environment, People, Management, Mobility, Economy. To this set we have added an eighth dimension, the smartness dimension \(\Omega\), that is related to measuring the quantity and quality of the ICT resources employed in the university that are transversal to the rest of the dimensions. The methodology proposed is centered on the selection of a large set of indicators associated with the seven dimensions, in order to obtain a standardized value aimed at measuring the overall development degree in universities, i.e., its smartification process. From the set of 79 indicators used in our methodology, \(\lambda=33\) are technological/smart indicators and \(q=46\) are indicators designed to collect diverse information on academic aspects, operations, results, infrastructure and environment, including the results of the Degree program. Our research work addresses the question _\"how smart is the smart university\"_. In doing so, we have faced several difficulties that may limit the value of our research: (1) Lack of reference methods in the literature, which can provide the basis for elaborating a formal answer to this question. As we have reviewed in Section 2, the works that present smart initiatives are described from a technological rather than a methodological perspective and hardly quantify the value of their smartification; (2) Difficulty in measuring the real impact that smart university strategies have on the university community, resources (e.g., buildings) and the environment. In fact, we have defined two indicators, KPI (number