1.2 Research objectives
Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
We aim in this work to fill the mentioned gap in the literature and characterize the status of government enterprise architecture in the two countries, the key objectives of this research are:
• Analyze the context of e‐Government in Egypt and Syria and especially G2G sector to identify the strategic drivers for GEA program.
• Identify the challenges of GEA development.
• Assess the maturity of current GEA capabilities.
1.3 Research structure
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows; Section 2 presents a background and literature review, while section 3 presents the suggested research approach for analysis. In section 4 and 5 we analyze the cases of Egypt and Syria consecutively using the suggested approach, in section 6, we present our findings and discussions; finally, conclusions are presented in section 7.
2. Background and literature review
In this section, we will review some issues and challenges related to e‐Government; and explore the adoption of enterprise architecture in the context of government.
2.1 E‐Government: Issues and challenges
Many developing countries launched e‐Government initiatives with the aim of improving the quality of government services delivery, and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public sector organizations. However while some governments have been successful in implementing e‐Government initiatives, many initiatives fail to live up to expectations( Heeks, 2003), Heeks finds that 85 % of e‐Government initiatives in developing countries are either total or partial failure.
There are three e‐Government delivery models, which stated in much of the literatures, including G2C, G2B and G2G( AlNagi and Hamdan, 2009). This research focuses on G2G directly as it could be considered as the backbone of any e‐Government program, due to its impact on integrating services offered to citizens. The development of G2G services in developing countries faces many challenges that can be classified from multiple perspectives, but for brevity, we outline the critical challenges according to( Ebrahim and Irani, 2005; Ezz, 2006; Vanka, 2007; AlNagi and Hamdan, 2009):
• Coordination challenges: each agency has its own set of procedures and projects, these projects often are not based on standards, leading to an increased complexity and weak interoperability.
• Agility challenges: e‐Government today needs the ability to respond to the fast and continuous changes in the environment( new channels and technologies) to deliver more efficient services.
• Cost challenges: successful implementation is rarely shared, leading unfortunately to the duplication of effort and resources.
• Legal challenges: establishing an integrated management structure and ensuring the conditions and sustainability of collaboration among different ministries
E‐Government services are classified into front office and back office service delivery; Front office services include interaction between citizens and civil servants, while the back office includes registration and coordination activities. Back office cooperation is considered a serious bottleneck in e‐Government because of interoperability problems( Klischewski and Abubakr, 2010). E‐Government interoperability has three dimensions according to the e‐Government guide provided by( UNDP, 2007), they are: organizational interoperability, semantic interoperability and technical interoperability, and in order to address these levels of interoperability, UNDP guide emphasizes the importance of enterprise architecture and recommends that Service Oriented Architecture( SOA) is the best underlying paradigm with which to begin to roll out e‐ Government services that can be used in cross‐agency situations.
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