Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
2.2 Enterprise architecture in the context of Government
Enterprise Architecture( EA) can be defined as a comprehensive description of all of the key elements and relationships that make up an organization( Spewak, 1993) cited in( Depalo and Song, 2012); also as a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise ' s organizational structure, business processes and information systems( Lankhorst, 2009). EA is usually represented via four domains or layers: business architecture, data architecture, applications architecture and technical architecture( Saha, 2009).
Enterprise Architecture has come as a possible solution to address critical issues that face the development of e‐Government successfully; EA was first adopted in the government context by the US government when Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework( FEAF) was published( Malveau, 2004). Later many governments worldwide used the phrase“ Government Enterprise Architecture” abbreviated as GEA in their implementation strategies, and many academic studies pointed to its potential to enable interoperability, resource reuse and ability to deliver efficient services( Saha, 2009; Ojo et al, 2012).
In this research, we consider Government Enterprise Architecture( GEA) as a holistic architectural approach that aims to achieve integration and interoperability between government agencies; also to guide IT strategic planning.
Different measures were used to measure the EA maturity, including effectiveness measures, status measures, measures of different levels within the organization, or specific areas such as the EA documentation, principles and artifacts making up the EA, However one of the important models for measuring GEA maturity at national level was presented by( Gotze et. al, 2009); the model was adopted in the assessment of enterprise architecture programs in 13 nations. Figure 1 shows this model that consists of four levels:( 0) awareness,( 1) establishment,( 2) operation and( 3) value‐adding; the awareness level gives only 0.5 point, the levels( 1, 2, 3) includes different capabilities, and each capability in each level has a weight, the model does not require that one level of maturity be completely fulfilled before moving on the next level, we will adopt this model later in the analysis of our cases.
Figure 1: Government enterprise architecture maturity model adopted from( Gotze et. al, 2009)
3. Research approach
A case study approach was utilized because this research aimed to explore certain phenomena( adoption of EA) within a particular context like government( Yin, 2003), a qualitative interpretative approach was used to gain an in‐depth understanding of the context( Walsham 1995), as well as the challenges that affect the adoption of enterprise architecture in the public sector. We analyze the cases of Egypt and Syria, as part of our analysis, we studied many documents about e‐Government strategies and other related documents( plans,
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