Towards an enterprise architecture for public administration using a top-down approach

Abstract

-The use of Enterprise Architectures is becoming increasingly widespread in the private sector. Borrowing insights from enterprise reference architectures developed during the last decade, IT vendors and companies belonging to specific industries are establishing reference data and process models advancing the standardization of their businesses and creating a more integrated environment for their activities. Although public administrations share the same problem of non-standardization, which is being magnified rapidly in a changing and demanding environment, little has been done so far in the direction of integration. This article builds a basis, shows initial directions and attempts to stimulate interest in a PA enterprise framework. Following a top-down approach and employing concepts from the fields of public administration, enterprise integration and generic process and data modeling the outline of the ArchPad enterprise architecture for Public Administration is presented.

Barriers and impediments to transformational government: insights from literature and practice

“…Gupta and Jana, 2003;Layne and Lee, 2001). After the first stages of information provisioning and simple online transactions have been achieved, governments start to undertake integration efforts that will make governments more joined-up, demand-driven and pro-active towards citizens and businesses (Peristeras and Tarabanis, 2000;West, 2004). However, many of these initiatives did not result in real transformation and only existing practices are digitized.…”

Rethinking the Semantic Annotation of Services

“…Apart from the inclusion of social metadata, we have also included eGovernment domain specific semantics in the semantic descriptions of our services. Towards this direction, the GEA Public Service model [15,16] was employed, which introduces a conceptual representation of a public service. As such, it introduces core concepts of a public service, such as service input and output, service provider, service preconditions, service domain etc.…”

The Development of a Reference Architecture for Local Government

“…In order to manage all changes, ensure interoperability, public agencies want to develop enterprise architectures, as its purpose to effectively align the strategies of enterprises with their business processes and the coordination of their resources [26], [36]. Enterprise architecture defined and interrelated data, hardware, software, and communications resources, as well as the supporting organization required to maintain the overall physical structure requires by the architecture [29].…”

“…Systems are often development within departments without having in mind the big picture capturing the enterprise architecture of the whole organization. The existence of isolated, overlapping in function and content, highly fragmented, and unrelated computerized applications within the same public organization has resulted in a major interoperability problem and has led to 'isolated islands of technology' while information systems were viewed as being internal to the public organizations [26].…”

“…[6], [9], [24], [26], [30]), public managers find it difficult to translate the architecture to their specific situation, use these architectures to guide their decision-making and use these architectures as guidance for development from the existing situation. One of the reasons is that concepts are only vaguely defined, too abstract or too technical defined [18], [26]. As such public organizations are looking for ways to get insight into their current situation and to develop a reference architecture that can be used for managing the road to the future.…”