Mohamed Ali Mohamed, Galal Hassan Galal‐Edeen and Hesham Ahmed Hassan
conducted in this field, our suggested approach for the analysis includes the identification of the strategic drivers and challenges of development, based on the analysis of many government documents, related researches and using semi‐structured interviews with the responsible stakeholders; and the assessment of the maturity of current EA activities.
Depending on our analysis, we offer the following set of success factors for effective establishment and management of Government Enterprise Architecture( GEA):
• Sufficient planning: by organizing a qualified team and have a clear ownership, formulate the mission and gain the support from top management and funding.
• Stakeholder involvement: by focusing on the early development of business architecture to engage various stakeholders, also it is important to have a legal framework for collaboration in place.
• Localized framework: enterprise architecture framework can serve as a guide to what enterprise architecture should contain and how to create it, there are many frameworks available today, with different contents and targets, it is important to localize a framework to suit the local requirements.
• Change Culture: to address the collaborative nature of the process of EA development, the cultural and institutional issues should be taken in consideration just as technical issues.
• Agile Development: the development of enterprise architecture does not represent a series of static artifacts but it is an ongoing process and EA artifacts( principles, models, diagrams, narratives, etc.) are continually revisited and evaluated based on their contribution to business value and feedback from stakeholders.
• Evaluation: establishing key performance indicators early to address the difficulties of funding, and follow up the national EA maturity models.
The previous success factors may serve as guidelines for improving the awareness among stakeholders; some of them can be treated in the future research. Finally, the development of enterprise architecture within the context of e‐Government should be considered as an endless journey, not as a project. This way, the two countries can continuously capture and learn from the lessons they gain to reach a mature enterprise architecture that can help in enhancing the efficiency and interoperability of e‐Government services.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully thank the stakeholders at Ministry of State for Administrative Development in Egypt and Ministry of Communications and Technology in Syria for their support and collaboration in this research.
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