Adopting CEAF

The proposed CEAF will urge government departments at all levels to share information such as budgets, to allow for the creation of better solutions for the whole-of-government. Existing initiatives are currently limited to the procurement “economy of scale” level, or a superficial collaboration necessitated by an information exchange requirement within various departments of government. As envisaged in this work, the CEAF is defined as the link between government strategy and the corresponding capabilities and technology assets of the whole-of-government in action.

CEAF Governance

Governance, Risk Management, and Control (GRC) protect investments, provide transparency of decisions, and create accountability among government decision makers. The Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Framework (CEAF) requires an additional factor: making decisions based on government directions, and reducing the duplication of functionality among various government departments. These investments provide significantly higher value when they are protected by GRC, aligning investment with strategic direction. In the context of disruptive technologies, it is vital that these risks be identified quickly and handled effectively, as new technologies provide a wide gamut of options and expose the organisation to a suite of uncertainties, in terms of business and technology strategies and their execution. GRC brings together corporate governance, controls and reporting, and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), in order to ensure compliance with rules and regulations. The components of GRC are defined as: 1) Governance, the overall management approach, and Controls to direct the organisation; 2) Risk management that supports governance, through which management identifies, analyses, and (where necessary) responds appropriately to risks; and 3) Compliance, conforming to stated Requirements, Standards, and Regulations.

CEAF Implementation Roadmap

Working collaboratively and providing Citizen Services on a whole-of-government model require intensive resources, planning a methodology, and support by senior executives. This, in turn, requires extensive electronic and mobile collaboration. The rapidity of global communications has certainly influenced the world's view of leadership toward seeing collaboration as an effective and efficient way to provide necessary services to citizens. This is also an intelligent way of looking at governments. Open-data initiatives will require a higher level of cooperation within and among government departments. The extent of changes and avoidance of various pitfalls for this implementation need to be thought through within governments and with external organisations.

Key Enterprise Architectural Challenges in Local Government

The many enterprise applications of government require a substantial level of collaboration. The impact of one decision on other aspects of the business requires analysis, including statistical (predictive) analytics, sentiment analytics, and cultural and skills analytics.Further, the shift from purely cost-centered decision making to that of “whole-of-government 1 is palpable. Accordingly, extensive electronic and mobile collaboration is required, even though such collaboration is counterintuitive to the mindset of prioritising according to departmental policies. In addition, the challenges governments face range from the time taken to approve an initiative, considering the complexity of processes, to its organisational structure and ever-changing technology in this age.

Key Elements of CEAF

The existing Enterprise Architecture Frameworks support the silos created by local government departmental requirements. However, as the concept of collaborative government progresses, this architecture will need to change so that it becomes a platform shared across many different services. For example, various functions of government, such as immigration, social security, and health services, regularly collaborate with one another to provide better service, without having many citizen touch points. This requires corresponding enterprise architecture for each department, referred to as a Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Framework (CEAF). The CEAF will provide advantages in the use of advancements in communication, security, and cloud-computing technology. Nowadays, when technological upheaval is imminent, an EAF must be refined and tuned. A study of the key elements of a CEAF would reduce resource usage based on physical layers of servers and client devices (optimisation of the infrastructures or databases), especially power usage. Similarly, it will propose high-level strategies to attain green ICT. This chapter will explore how CEAF can help incorporate SOA, cloud computing, mobile technology, and enhanced security to facilitate collaboration. This will offer organisations a framework for publishing and subscribing to data, information, knowledge, and intelligence services.