Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
Figure 3: Assessment of GEA Maturity in Syria We outline below the main points that has revealed from the analysis of our cases:
• The two countries have many strategic drivers for a mature enterprise architecture program to help them in their e‐Government development, Egypt has made progress more than Syria and it has the parts of the puzzle due to the implementation of SOA but not the big picture represented by GEA.
• Addressing the weak coordination between various projects that initiated by different ministries, was one of the most important strategic driver to establish GEA program in the two countries, in order to reduce cost and duplication and achieve higher business / IT alignment.
• Culture challenge was one of the most obvious challenges of developing enterprise architecture in Egypt and Syria, including lack of a shared understanding among stakeholders; weak commitment and collaboration, additionally the lack of architectural skills, so it is important to address the culture and awareness difficulties, by establishing shared understanding and knowledge base.
• The analysis of challenges that face GEA adoption reveals many correlations between them; like the link between planning and evaluation, including the problem of gaining support from top management and sufficient funding, because EA will produce long‐term benefits that are difficult to measure.
• The two countries are still in the establishment level and there seems to be no capabilities achieved in operation and value‐adding levels of the maturity model adopted in this research, they have really a significant amount of work to do before they will be able to raise their maturity to a higher level.
• There is a vital need for an effective framework for the management of enterprise architecture to address the specific challenges in the two developing countries.
The literature presented many other challenges relevant to adoption of enterprise architecture which have not appeared directly from our analysis including that the available development frameworks are incomplete and have many shortcomings( Depalo and Song, 2012; Mohamed et al., 2012), also the weak support of the semantic issues with the increasing complexity( Janssen et al, 2011), the absence of specific architectural principles( Stelzer, 2009), nowadays the role of enterprise architecture is challenging with the great potentials offered by cloud computing today( Mahmood, 2011 Janssen et al, 2011); the literature showed also the challenges of evaluation due to the lack of efficient methods for measurement and assessment( Liimatainen, 2008; Ojo et al., 2012).
7. Conclusions
Government Enterprise Architecture( GEA) has been considered as an approach to support the levels of interoperability, coordination between government agencies, and strategic planning. Many developed countries with mature and effective e‐Government programs attribute their success to effective enterprise architecture programs; however there is still a knowledge gap in some developing countries in this field.
The aim of this research was to characterize the role and importance of government enterprise architecture in Egypt and Syria, where the two countries actually issued a plan for EA development; however, the progress is still slow and had no impact on the overall performance, and there is no proper situation analysis has been
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