5. The case of Syria
Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
The e‐Government initiative of Syria is currently administered by the Ministry Of Communications and Technology( MOCT), which issued in 2009 the e‐Government strategy as a fundamental element in modernizing the public sector( MOCT, 2009). The implementation approach depends on centralized planning and decentralized implementation, by adding new e‐Government services, integrating them with existing services, and progressively developing the e‐Government architecture( Joukhadar and Anbar, 2008).
The academic studies that addressed the implementation of Syrian e‐Government are few, but one of the recent researches was conducted by( Kanaan and Atieh, 2011), they adopted a qualitative methodology to address the importance of business / IT alignment as an enabler for e‐Government in Syria. In their research, they argued that the main problem in the Syrian e‐Government strategy is the focus on the technological side more than others like business and people sides. Authors concluded that there is gap between IT and business strategies / people and could be considered one of the big challenges of e‐Government project and that there is a vital need for a holistic approach to close the gap.
The strategy pointed to the role of enterprise architecture in the implementation of e‐Government through part two of strategy that presents orientations( MOCT, 2009: pp33), by stating that:“ The technical dimension is a heavy burden on ministries, particularly the complex technical cases that may require the participation of several ministries to provide citizens with a service at an acceptable level. This obligates the Strategy to adopt the development of an E‐Government Enterprise Architecture that supports the central planning to create standards for the uniform delivery of government services electronically, and supports the decentralized implementation based on the provision of appropriate technical tools, common services and infrastructure, which eases the burden of inter‐coordination on the ministries”. One expert of the implementation team added they are aware of the importance of enterprise architecture and MOCT Ministry has a plan to implement it with the support of UN‐ESCWA.
5.1 Strategic drivers and challenges
Depending on the previous review and discussion with stakeholders, we present below the strategic drivers for government enterprise architecture in Syria:
• Achieve better business / IT alignment;
• Support the coordination between various projects started by different ministries.
• Enable efficient outsourcing: because they plan to continue relying on outsourcing partners.
• Enforce standardization and reusability to decrease costs.
Our discussions with the responsible stakeholders revealed that they suffer from a lack of skills and sufficient funding, they also suffer from culture of change resistance; additionally, they have the recognition that EA implementation is a complex process, and that there is a need for an efficient framework for EA management.
5.2 Assessment of maturity
In Syria, the awareness level is high and appears clearly in the strategy and that gives 0.5 point; in the establishment level, Syria has only a time plan for implementation and is given one point, and the overall weight becomes 1.5 points. Figure 3 shows a simplified view of this assessment.
6. Findings and discussions
Adoption of an architectural framework in the e‐Government context can be considered as a new experience in the two developing countries, because they have just reached to the maturity level where these strategies are considered to be important. However, EA will be very valuable in the vertical and horizontal integration stages of the e‐Government maturity model suggested by( Layne and Lee, 2001), due to its critical role in saving cost and increasing efficiency, so the early development of enterprise architecture is so important with the increased complexity.
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