Many countries all over the world proceed to a more systematic and comprehensive utilization of digital technologies in order to address the inherent problems of modern cities by designing and implementing integrated smart city policies. However, limited research has been conducted on these smart city policies, despite their importance for the development of smart cities; furthermore, this limited research has focused on the analysis of these policies from a thematic perspective (i.e. examining the city functions and infrastructures targeted for digital support). This study contributes to filling the above research gap by proceeding to a deeper analysis of these policies from two fundamental perspectives: public value generation and resulting digital transformation. Initially a methodology is developed for this purpose, which is based on the analysis of the textual descriptions of the specific smart city actions that these policies include, from the above two perspectives; this analysis uses as theoretical foundation and analytical lens a model of public values that can be generated through the use of digital technologies in government, as well as a comprehensive conceptualization of government digital transformation, developed from previous research. Using this methodology an analysis is conducted of the smart city policy of Greece, which includes 38 proposed actions. It is concluded that i) the dominant type of public value that the proposed smart city actions will generate is in internal efficiency improvement of local government organizations (81,6% of the actions), followed by enrichment of the services provided to the citizens (44,7% of the actions); ii) the main kind of digital transformation that these smart city actions will drive is the digital transformation of the internal processes of the local government organizations (73,7% of the actions), followed by the digital transformation of the services provided to the citizens (36,8% of the actions). These results indicate an ‘inward-looking’ orientation of this smart city policy, despite the predominantly ‘outward-looking’ orientation that characterizes the smart city concept; finally, some possible explanations for this are provided.