Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
newspaper clippings, schedules, presentations and reports); we also carried out semi‐structured interviews with different participants in order to gather information.
Our proposed approach to analyze the cases of Egypt and Syria includes the following steps:
• Examine the current status of e‐Government development depending on our qualitative study and review of previous studies.
• Collect the strategic drivers for GEA program and identify the challenges that affect the slow progress of GEA development.
• Assess the maturity of GEA according to the maturity model presented in the previous section.
4. The case of Egypt
The Ministry of State for Administrative Development( MSAD) is responsible for e‐Government program in Egypt; MSAD aims to create an efficient administration that provides government services to citizens quickly, accurately, and efficiently. MSAD has many achievements that have appreciated worldwide like the organization of the recent elections that won international awards from United Nations. One of the important milestones in the development of e‐Government in Egypt is the opening of the“ El Bawaba” portal( www. egypt. gov. eg), this portal, meant to implement a one‐stop shop solution, calls also for appropriate backend solutions enabling process integration between the various governmental agencies.
In IT the field, we interviewed the general director of G2G services and some projects managers, they have started in 2009 the implementation of the national Service Oriented Architecture( SOA) to support e‐ Government interoperability efforts. The program director noted that SOA has been an effective facilitator in convincing the ministries to participate in G2G projects because it ensured existing data ownership and privacy(“ we ' re not dealing with databases, we ' re dealing with web services”). In the business field, we interviewed some of project managers who are responsible for restructuring the government agencies by analyzing their business processes and improving them using reengineering methodology; we noted that there is a weak alignment between them and IT department.
Some researches addressed G2G sector and SOA adoption in Egypt. Ezz( 2006) provided a suggested framework for inter‐governmental collaboration in Egypt and argued that technology adoption may be impossible unless the related organizational problems are addressed such as weak coordination, standardization and legislations; in another research conducted by( Klischewski and Abubakr, 2010), authors provided several lessons about SOA adoption in Egypt, the lessons include: sharing data is the key to e‐ Government interoperability, however data accuracy do not come through SOA; also SOA is not an efficient backbone for providing bulk data needed for political decision support; and legal framework is a prerequisite for establishing an integrated management structure and ensuring the sustainability of collaboration among ministries; furthermore, Klischewski( 2011) criticized the technology‐first approach of Egyptian government in the adoption of SOA and concluded that issues of semantic and organizational interoperability have not appeared on the agenda until now, which is expected to change when the overall complexity increased with the growing reuse of services. Klischewski argued that SOA cannot be the guiding vision for solving all problems coming up, and MSAD will be in need to promote other conceptualizations like ontologies and enterprise architecture.
Egyptian government was aware of the importance of enterprise architecture early, and in the late of 2006; MSAD released a document titled“ Egyptian Government Enterprise Architecture Framework( EGEAF)”, to address the development of enterprise architecture within e‐Government program( MSAD, 2006). The technical team at MSAD reviewed available frameworks in the field of enterprise architecture and tried to localize a suitable framework according to the context of the Egyptian government. They recommended adopting a customized version of Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework( FEAF); also the document included general guidelines and the main characteristics. However; previous studies pointed that this document has no impact until now( Klischewski, 2011).
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