Moving towards the Connected Transformational Government

This chapter provides insights into interoperability from the point of view of delivering government services. It shows that today, technology and the industry have progressed to such an extent that the technical barriers to interoperability can be overcome in many ways. The real challenge is to address business interoperability that involves the interplay of technical, architectural, strategic, organizational, policy, and legal dimensions. This, in turn, has influenced the evolution of government interoperability frameworks, where some governments have incorporated Enterprise Architecture approaches. Today, new socio-economic challenges require policy makers to rethink their approaches in ways that will enable them to constantly improve and evolve citizen-centric services powered by an ICT-enabled Connected Transformational Government.

Architecting for Connected Healthcare

The healthcare system is in many countries operated by the governments, and interaction with the healthcare system is one of the most frequent interactions between citizen and government. Demographic, medical, and technological changes are likely to bring new aspects of connectedness into the everyday life of people and place healthcare and homecare professionals in new roles. A transformation is taking place where hospital best practices are constantly reducing patient’s in-hospital stays to alternative, less-costly care—notably at home. Telemedicine, telehealth, eHealth, home monitoring, and self-care are essential aspects of this transformation. Many issues are influencing this transformation, and new barriers are showing up where others are removed. A broadly oriented enterprise architecture effort is presented for the underpinning of the change process. The architectural approach encompasses views of the citizen, the healthcare system, the information infrastructure, and the citizen-oriented technology. A case of telemonitoring and self-care is presented using mobile hypertension measurement on a large-scale population cohort. Evaluation of the acceptance and success of the solutions is done within a combined understanding including technology, economy, organization, and culture.

An Investigative Assessment of the Role of Enterprise Architecture in Realizing E-Government Transformation

In this chapter, some important e-strategies are investigated concerning the existence and the contribution of an EA to strategic implementation and transformation. Different EAs are compared, and architectures are aligned to strategic and to transformation objectives, via Connected Government. Moreover, the necessity of the alignment of an EA to the strategic update is underlined, and an EA maturity roadmap to Connected Government is considered.

National Enterprise Architecture Framework

Building on the belief that a positive correlation between the desired level of e-government capability and maturity and the required level of architectural maturity exists, the eGovernment Authority (eGA) of the kingdom of Bahrain embarked on a three-year eGovernment program aimed at improving service delivery to citizens through seamless integration and connected governance. In order to achieve this objective, eGA realized the need for a Kingdom-wide strategy and holistic guiding plans, and hence decided to design and develop a National Enterprise Architecture Framework (NEAF). NEAF is an aggregation of models and meta-models, governance, compliance mechanisms, technology standards, and guidelines put together to guide effective development and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture by different government entities across the Kingdom. This chapter will describe a NEAF development project success story, its objectives, and its importance to Bahrain’s economic vision 2030. It describes the NEAF development lifecycle and highlights the findings and challenges faced at each stage of the project.

IT and Enterprise Architecture in US Public Sector Reform

This chapter looks at public sector whole-of-government reform from an Information Technology (IT) focused Enterprise Architecture (EA) perspective. The chapter summarizes reforms undertaken under three US presidents—Clinton, Bush, and Obama—and discusses how they have too frequently failed to meet expectations of policy makers, public servants, the public, and other stakeholders. We find that IT reforms in support of larger public sector reform have been ineffective and unsustainable, although many IT reforms have been successful in a narrower context. EA has suffered as a once promising methodology: it has not become the “silver bullet” in managing the IT and information infrastructure to support reform, knowledge management, and decision making. It was also seen as an important tool for reducing information management silos that successive governments have unsuccessfully tried to reduce. This chapter raises the spectre of endemic barriers to reform that must be overcome if EA and IT reform are to realize their potential, and offers recommendations for overcoming these hurdles in the context of whole-of-government public sector reforms.

Connected Government as the New Normal

Around the world, governments are constantly facing new demands, greater expectations, and an increasingly more vociferous and assertive citizenry calling for better governance. In such a scenario, governments can ill-afford to ignore such demands and expectations. The current challenges faced by governments, for example in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, represent a complex mix of political, legal, social, and economic issues. These are increasingly not limited to national boundaries, and the underlying inter-linkages cannot be overstated. This confluence of demands, expectations, challenges, and trends require governments to be connected in the broadest and deepest sense. The traditional governments operating in relative isolation and projecting an image of infallibility are rapidly being replaced by governments that are more networked, responsive, collaborative, and participative. Co-creation of services leading to co-production of government is the new paradigm. This transition requires fundamental change in current mental models, supported by a structured and disciplined approach to conceive and design the connected government. Taking a whole-of-government perspective is a critical success factor. It is imperative to think strategically to elevate the role of enterprise architecture. This chapter identifies the key dimensions of connected government, presents their distinctive attributes, explores the powerful, but, in some cases, controversial, concepts of connected government, and by embracing a systemic approach, investigates the criticality of enterprise architecture in powering connected government. The foundational ideas in this chapter lay out a broad framework for understanding and benefiting from enterprise architecture, actualized via the edifice of connected government.

An Approach to Multi-Agency and Intra-Agency Unification with Enterprise Architecture Driven e-Government in South Africa

The diplomatic path towards standardizing data-administration practices within government is not always direct. Due consideration was given to technology, organization, people and process aspects. It would seem that the outcomes, which resulted from employing the ontology, addressed an underlying need of governmental agencies across the board, namely the need for unification. This chapter explains how multi-agency and intra-agency unification was facilitated.

A Public Economics Approach to Enabling Enterprise Architecture with the Government Cloud in Belgium

In this framework, the move of legacy systems to the Cloud and the overall risks related to the implementation of cloud computing are discussed. The main question is if a government can implement ambitious cloud computing projects without EA, and if not, which stage should be used?

The Power of EA Taxonomies in Enhancing Portfolio Visibility and Optimising Decision Making

This chapter describes the power of using Enterprise Architecture (EA) taxonomies in making sense of an organisation and its components to support portfolio visibility and optimise decision-making. It describes the use of taxonomies in a manner that has been successfully applied across a range of medium to large organisations particularly at a whole-of-government level within the Queensland Government, the Gold Coast City Council, and at an agency level within the Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney-General. These taxonomies enable increased visibility of an organisation’s investment portfolio to support more structured decision-making and provide a basis for evidence-based policy development. At the whole-of-government level, this supports optimisation of information and IT investments across the entire connected government portfolio.

An Architecture Driven Methodology for Transforming from Fragmented to Connected Government

Connected government implies that citizens and enterprises can interact with government as with a single entity rather than with a number of different public authorities. In countries characterized by a highly fragmented system of Local Government, connected government at the local level can be achieved only through a process of progressive integration on a wider area of systems of local government already integrated at the local level. In the chapter, the author argues that this process should be based on a maturity model and a reference model that define the technological and organizational conditions that allow the establishment of more and more integrated aggregations of municipalities. With reference to a study funded by the Region Lombardia (Italy), the chapter introduces the concept of Integrated System of Local Government (ISLG) and describes the process that leads to the establishment of ISLGs as an intermediate step toward connected government at the local level. Moreover, the chapter discusses the conditions that can induce different aggregations of municipalities to comply with a set of standard requirements in the implementation of their integration processes.