Enterprise Architectures for E-Government Development

Abstract

There are two common strategies for the development of e-government projects. One approach is demand based e-government initiatives having no national level centralized Enterprise Architecture. The other is the development of projects under the shadow of a predefined set of guidelines following a given Enterprise Architecture at the national level. It is similar to developing a demand based unplanned city development verses a master plan based development. Complex electronic service deliveries need allied and synchronized output of all the projects. Architectural approach provides guidelines from project planning to technical development and operations. It aligns all the e-government projects with some standard principles. A National Enterprise Architecture based approach provides a number of benefits, including institutionalization of top level strategic planning, standardized development across all levels of e-government, sustainability of e-government projects when governments change, cost reduction by sharing resources and better return on investment. There are many enterprise architectures for e-government development. Different countries are experimenting with different enterprise architectures. In this chapter, e-government projects and their devolution is discussed using Zachman Framework, Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), A Reference Model for Collaboration Networks (ARCON), The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), and Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF). It is recommended that architectural implementation should be aligned with governing structure of a country such as centralized, devolved and decentralized. However, governments may use a decentralized architecture and devolve it to its sub-nationals such as state/provincial level and city level as per their political, fiscal and administrative needs and capacity.