From Governance Principles to Architectural Primitives: Designing and Evaluating a Microservices-Based Smart Governance Platform for a Wellness Tourism Ecosystem

Abstract

The growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in tourism underscores the need for governance models that integrate strategic processes with technological infrastructures. Although digital platforms are widely credited with operationalizing governance principles such as transparency, accountability and participation, the mechanisms through which architectural decisions enact those principles remain largely unspecified. This article presents the design and evaluation of a smart governance platform for a wellness tourism ecosystem[1], developed through a hybrid methodology combining Design Science Research with the Waterfall model and Scrum. The study makes three contributions. First, it proposes an explicit mapping between six governance principles and the architectural primitives that enact them — bounded contexts with private data stores, asynchronous event propagation, role-based access control, and a consolidated analytical store — together with the observable evidence each primitive produces. Second, it documents the resulting microservices-based artifact as a reference decomposition, stating the alternatives rejected and the trade-offs accepted. Third, it reports an evaluation combining architectural analysis with functional and load testing, identifying sensitivity points and residual risks alongside confirmed strengths in scalability and reliability. The findings show that governance principles are not satisfied by digital platforms in general, but by specific and traceable architectural choices — notably the reconciliation of transparency and autonomy through the propagation mechanism rather than through access-control policy.