Collaborative Enterprise Architecture for Municipal Environments

E-government evolves according to strategic plans with the coordination of central Governments. This top-down procedure succeeds in slow but sufficient transformation of public services into e-Government ones. However, public agencies adapt to e-Government with difficulty, requiring holistic guidance and a detailed legal framework provided by the Government. The setting up of common Enterprise Architecture for all public agencies requires careful analysis. Moreover, common Enterprise Architecture could fail to cover the special needs of small or municipal agencies. The chapter uses data from various major e-Government strategies, together with their enterprise architectures, in order to introduce a development model of municipal Enterprise Architecture. The model is based on the experience collected from the Digital City of Trikala, central Greece, and results in “Collaborative Enterprise Architecture”.

The Criticality of Transformational Leadership to Advancing United States Government Enterprise Architecture Adoption

An effective enterprise architecture (EA) capability enables an organization to develop sound enterprise plans, make informed human, materiel, and technology resource investment and management decisions, and optimize key business processes. Despite U.S. Congressional legislation, U.S. Office of Management and Budget guidance, and U.S. Government Accountability Office reports and recommendations, many U.S. government leaders struggle in advancing EA adoption in their organizations. U.S. Government leaders must embrace transformational leadership to advance EA adoption. The author presents the Vision, Integrity, Communication, Inspiration, and Empowerment Transformational Leadership Model that describes competencies U.S. Government leaders need to advance EA adoption. The author also presents the Transformational Leadership and Enterprise Management Integration Framework that describes the relationship between transformational leadership and enterprise management functions. U.S. Government leaders must adopt this framework to realize improved enterprise performance.

People-Led Enterprise Architecture

This chapter provides an approach to Enterprise Architecture that is people-led, as a contrast to being led by technology or modelling methodology. It identifies the major stakeholders in Enterprise Architecture and suggests where in the organisation they may be found and how they may be connected with the Enterprise Architecture. It highlights the roles of stakeholders throughout the process of defining and implementing an Enterprise Architecture. The view of stakeholders managing the EA effort is described through the complete lifecycle, from setting the EA mission to sustaining the benefits after implementation. In proposing the adoption of such an approach, we aim to encourage a more direct link between Enterprise Architecture, the needs of the stakeholders it serves, and the pubic policy outcomes it enables.

Government Enterprise Architectures

This chapter describes the development and use of government enterprise architectures for the framing and alignment of the core business processes and enabling information systems at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Centrelink Social Services agency. The chapter focuses on the construction and ongoing maintenance of public enterprise architectures that enable the alignment condition. An established research model has been used to guide the analysis and explication of the government business processes, enabling systems and architectures, and the resulting agency alignment. While the discussion acknowledges the existence of other formal and informal enablers of alignment (such as strategic planning or management support), this chapter concentrates on the enterprise architecture enabler. The functionally integrated government business processes and information systems that are established within the instantiated enterprise architecture are examined. The agencies’ performance data reflects two public organizations that are closely aligned and have achieved upper benchmarked outcomes and recognition awards. The agencies’ business processes and architectural practices conform to established theoretical frameworks.

Policy Mapping

Few government executives can explain the enterprise architecture of his or her agency, and it is rare to find a political executive who is able to explain how their political objectives are furthered by a government- wide enterprise architecture (Holmes, 2007). This low level of awareness translates to enterprise architecture efforts that are often undervalued and under funded because the budget priorities of political and functional executives rarely include enterprise architecture. Unsurprisingly, many points of tension exist as the CIOs and architects work to translate political goals into resources and architectural plans supporting the agency’s programs. This tension, between the rational orientation of enterprise architecture advocated by the CIO and the political nature of policy goals sought by executives, often puts a CIO at odds with his or her organization’s political and functional executives. This chapter discusses that tension, and advocates that CIOs and enterprise architects develop a “Policy Map” to bridge the gap between the political and the rational perspectives. A policy map provides the “Purpose Reference Model” missing from present architecture models and policies, and visually portrays and communicates key relationships between policy goals and functional programs on the one hand, and the enterprise architecture and its implementing IT initiatives on the other hand. A well-crafted Policy Map is a visual reference for aligning resources, effort, architecture, and the policy goals of political executives.

Maturity Model Based on Quality Concept of Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA)

Quite a good amount of time has been spent seeking appropriate solutions to handle the giant information technology expenditure not only in government sectors but also in private sectors all over the world. Beginning with OMB, which substantially leads the U.S. governmental efforts in ITA/EA area, seems to be on the right path using process improvement concept in its ITA/EA maturity model (OMB, 2007_2). EA community still finds it difficult to introduce quality management concept into its business and practices. Therefore in this chapter, we would like to suggest a more practical ITA/EA maturity model based on the quality concept of enterprise information architecture (EIA), which is ROI–driven, practical and based on four-phased process improvement approach for the EA community. We hope that this approach could bring a substantial reduction in the costs and efforts in the entire ITA/EA area and provide sustainable development environment for the ITA/EA like the argument of the environmentalists.

A Methodology for Government Transformation with Enterprise Architecture

Countries across the world are pushing their frontiers in governance in the move to information economy, and governments play a pivotal role in this transformation. These governments employ modern information and communication technologies to serve the citizens and businesses better. Raising the effectiveness and quality of government services is not only a matter of leading edge technologies; it also involves visionary leadership, clear objectives and sound execution mechanism. The role of Enterprise Architecture in shaping E-Government programmes cannot be overstated. Within the context of Singapore’s e-government initiative, this chapter describes the Methodology for AGency ENTerprise Architecture (MAGENTA), a rigorous, disciplined and structured methodology for development of agency enterprise architectures that enables agencies to align to and fully support the government’s transformation objectives and outcomes. Mechanisms for agencies to align to the overall Government Enterprise Architecture are detailed. The chapter concludes with a set of recommendations for future enhancements and research.

Enterprise Architecture and Governance Challenges for Orchestrating Public-Private Cooperation

The ambition of the Dutch government is to create a demand-driven government by means of effective use of information and communication technology. This requires not only public, but also private parties to interact with each other. This is a complex endeavour as private and public organizations have their own goals, systems and architectures that need to be coordinated. Within this setting, a new architecture should be created for managing and orchestrating the interactions among governmental and private organizations. In this chapter we present an architecture aimed at supporting the coordination of public and private parties for creating a one stop shop and the main challenges therein. We found that a publicprivate service network poses higher requirements on the architecture of a service network, whereas the variety in systems of the various organizations and different aims make it more difficult to develop such an architecture. Furthermore, it is difficult to isolate architectural challenges from governance aspects, as many architectural issues need to be complemented by governance mechanisms. Architecture and governance cannot be considered in isolation.

The GEA

Departing from the lack of coherent and ready-to-use models and domain descriptions for public administration, we present here our effort to build a set of generic models that serves as a top-level, generic and thus reusable Enterprise Architecture for the overall public administration domain. We have called this set of models Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA). GEA has deliberately remained technology independent and following the Model Driven Architecture approach, GEA constitutes a computationally independent model for the domain. GEA has been derived from multi-disciplinary influences and insights and identifies two broad modeling areas, called governance mega-processes: Public Policy Formulation and Service Provision. These two, together with the object versus process perspective, form a four-cell matrix that defines four modeling areas for the GEA models. To populate these cells with models we use a challenging metaphor: we model the society - public administration interaction as a discourse to identify important elements and functions of the governance system. Until now, a large number of services has been modeled using GEA and more recently, an extended modeling effort has started with GEA being chosen for use by a national EU-country project. GEA can be also used as a knowledge infrastructure for applying semantic technologies. In this line, it has been used for creating a public administration specialization of a formal Semantic Web Service ontology, namely WSMO.

Role of Beacon Architecture in Mitigating Enterprise Architecture Challenges of the Public Sector

This chapter introduces the concept of Beacon Architecture as a formalized and ordered grouping of architectural elements, describing the constituents, their order, correlation and likely evolution of the grouping; and illustrating its specific value to the public sector. The first half of the chapter builds up to the concept, the reasons behind its specific nature, and its value to enterprises, especially in the public sector. For this, the chapter is split into a number of sections that may be studied separately and that also build up to introduce Beacon Architecture. The sections may be broadly divided as concepts, historical overview, illustrative case studies in public sector transformations along with a summary of peculiar architectural challenges they face, and a cyclical pattern to Architecture Development. After introducing and elucidating on concept and constituents of Beacon Architecture, the chapter delves into its correlation with architecture concepts in currency and its role in mitigating enterprise architecture challenges illustrated earlier in the chapter, before concluding on an assessment of future trends.