Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
4.1 Strategic drivers and challenges
Our analysis of the implementation of SOA in Egypt and discussions with program director and project mangers revealed many strategic drivers for mature enterprise architecture, we outline below the strategic drivers for government enterprise architecture in Egypt.
• Enable effective adoption of SOA especially with the increased complexity and size, it is vital to have the big picture in mind.
• Support coordination and integration between various projects.
• Address the semantic and organizational levels of interoperability that are not addressed by SOA, since the main focus of SOA is on a technical level.
• Consider the impact of new business operations, channels and technologies, and engage stakeholders from the business field.
• Plan for the development of the government cloud: EA as a comprehensive approach can help to clarify many issues that are of concern to agencies including performance, cost, and security.
Regarding the slow progress of GEA program and challenges faced, the G2G program director said“ the delay in their GEA program is due to the focus on the implementation of SOA at the expense of enterprise architecture because government agencies are lacking of e‐Government experience and therefore cannot initially contribute to organizational interoperability, nor follow a preset methodology, and the only way to proceed is the implementation of a well‐recommended technology path such as SOA”, however they are aware that adopting service oriented enterprise architecture will be more holistic and valuable. Our discussions with the teamwork showed that most of the challenges that affect the development of enterprise architecture are related to the planning issues including weak support of top management, involving stakeholders, budget constraints, awareness among project teams, unclear ownership; finally, the lack of evaluation tools was an emerging challenge.
4.2 Assessment of maturity
Here, we will adopt the maturity model presented by( Gotze et. al, 2009) that was discussed in section 2, In Egypt, the awareness level is high and that gives 0.5 point, be reviewing the achieved capabilities with the program director, it was clear that Egypt have only three capabilities at the level 1, there is a plan for implementation, generic EA guidelines have been provided, also stakeholders commitment was legally enforced because the prime minister of Egypt in 2010 issued the decree no. 856 concerning the commitment of ministries and government bodies to exchange data between them in accordance to the national plan on integration, accordingly Egypt gains 3 points in the establishment level, and the overall weight becomes 3.5 points. Figure 2 shows a simplified view of this assessment.
Figure 2: Assessment of GEA maturity in Egypt
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