# Facilitating Successful Smart Campus Transitions: A Systems Thinking-SWOT Analysis Approach
## 1 Introduction  
Smart City development and operation efforts have recorded varied performance, globally. However, similar attempts in Africa have been met with challenges attributed to contextual peculiarities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. For instance, there seems to be a palpable fear that the adoption of ICT technologies for Smart Cities will deepen the technology and poverty divide in these contexts [5]. Moreover, it is believed that these cities will promote exclusion and inequality instead of inclusion. Furthermore, it is feared that the expenditure towards Smart City development cannot be reasonably justified in the face of other societal challenges like hunger, strife, and outbreaks of different diseases [5, 6]. Aside from elucidating communal perceptions which negate Smart City transitions in such climes, these perceptions render the consideration of contextual peculiarities during the planning, design, and development of Smart Cities imperative. Therefore, there is need to develop Smart Cities that support high levels of economic inclusivity and security in the developingworld context [7]. Proponents of Smart Cities have advocated for its initiation at a micro level and scaling up upon acceptance by the populace based on increased appreciation and awareness concerning the modalities of such cities [8; 9; 10; 11]. This line of thought has given a fillip to the Smart Campus initiative. Universities have been described as living or real-world laboratories where innovative solutions are designed, developed, and tested for efficacy prior to eventual deployment at city-level [12; 13; 14; 15]. These roles extend beyond the conventional boundaries of knowledge creation for Smart Cities. Society expects these institutions to, relying on multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary (MIT) skill-sets available to them, serve as living laboratories for experimenting on Smart City components [15; 16]. Accordingly, reverberations of the achievements recorded within Smart Campuses are expected to be felt across multiple scales within Smart Cities [17; 18]. As part of the Smart Campus agenda, universities are transforming into Smart Communities imbued with Smart City attributes and vice versa [14; 15; 19; 20; 21]. Universities in South Africa are not left out as a cursory look at their websites and associated marketing paraphenalia reveals their aspirations to leverage digital technologies in transforming their operations, pedagogy, and research. These efforts are aimed at process optimization and efficiency savings and transforming learner-experiences [22]. Although these transitions are on-going, there is little evidence to show that the views of the users are being incorporated during the decision-making processes which govern its conceptualization, design, and implementation stages [23]. Scholars have observed the unidirectional nature of the Smart City implementation programs [24; 25]. This is despite the need for Smart Campus projects to be mostly human-centered and user driven [26; 27]. The South African University of Technology (SAUoT) is an institution where the systemic transition to a Smart Campus status is at an embryonic stage [28]. The desire to make a success of this initiative has necessitated the program proponents/designers to elicit the views of relevant stakeholder categories to foster effective decision-making and the prioritization of actionable ideas at this stage. The study on the transition process at SAUoT has been reported by the authors in previous studies [27; 29]. In the study by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [27], the significant contribution of user-centric design to the development of a common ontology concerning various stakeholder categories was articulated. In a subsequent study [29], [PERSON] and [PERSON] collated the perceptions of relevant stakeholder categories concerning the potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with the on-going transformation into a Smart Campus status at SAUoT.