October 01, 2008
Enterprise Architecture in Government: Fad or Future?
Together with Professor Jan Pries-Heje I have just had an article accepted for the 42th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January 2009.
To answer our research question on the purpose and drivers of EA, we used two research approaches: In the first part we gathered two focus groups, one with CIOs and one with chief enterprise architects in the Danish central government. In the second part we interviewed two experts – or “Gurus” – and analyzed official documents, newspapers and official websites.
We found the causal direction reversed from EA being transformative and prescriptive in its nature to EA being reshaped and adopted in step with the institutional forces in public organizations and their macro environment. To be more than just another fashion fad, future EA programs in government must provide a comprehensive and coherent view across business, information, and technology; not just to guide the design of IT systems – but to deliver business change supported and enabled by IT.
Abstract:
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been promoted as a key tool for transformation and modernization of government. In this paper we study what has driven the use and adoption of the EA concept in the Danish central government. Based on analysis of focus group and ‘guru’ interviews with government CIO’s, enterprise architects, and consultants, as well as extensive document studies, we find that there are two streams in public sector EA programs: a stable element of it-architecture and a fashion driven business architecture element – used in parallel, but with different focus, approach and artifacts. We conclude that EA in government to a large extend is driven by fashion. Finally, we discuss the role of EA in the future and point out that EA can not transform government by itself. Fundamental transformation to the tasks performed in public organizations is only achieved if institutional forces promote transformation.
Let me know if you want further details.
Posted by khm at 10:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 18, 2007
Guest Editor in Real Life
Clearing ones desk before the summer Holidays can be a rewarding experience. I just found my physical copy of the special issue on E-government Process Integration and Enterprise Architecture that I guest edited in the International Journal of Cases on Electronic Commerce with Vishanth Weerakkody and Marijn Janssen. Now I can show my wife that all the late hours that I spend editing the issue also materialized in something tangible.
In an entry last year I announced the call for papers and we received a bunch of quality papers – all good candidates for publications. However, in the end we decided to publish the following five papers:
- A Comparative Account of Joined-Up Government Initiatives in Dutch and Belgian Social Security
By Homburg, V. M. F.
- Integration and Enterprise Architecture Challenges in E-Government: A European Perspective
By Weerakkody, V.; Janssen, M.; Hjort-Madsen, K.
- Managing E-Government Application Evolution: A State Government Case
By Kung, H. J.; Tung, H. L.; Case, T.
- E-Mexico: Collaborative Structures in Mexican Public Administration
By Luna-Reyes, L. F.; Gil-Garcia, J. R.; Cruz, C. B.
- The E-Government Development, IT Strategies, and Portals of the Hong Kong SAR Government
By HO, K. K. W.
You can find all the papers here.
It was fun to work with Vishanth and Marijn and a great learning experience for me to edit a special issue in a journal. Hopefully, it will not be the last time I do that.
Posted by khm at 02:55 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 20, 2006
Framing National Enterprise Architectures
Visiting Dr. Marijn Janssen, I am in Delft this week working on a framework for analyzing national EA programs. We are trying to enrich a model that we developed earlier this year for a HICSS 2007 conference paper. The paper was accepted for HICSS and I presented our model at the EA Summit earlier this year. But, we still need to work with it if we want to submit it to a journal. Especially our theoretical foundation needs to be developed further.
The framework should results in a better understanding of national EA efforts. We hypotheses that an analysis of national EAs should at least encompass five elements, 1) Policies, actors and strategies, 2) Governance 3) Architecture model 4) Architecture principles and standards and 5) Implementations. We test this framework by analyzing the EA efforts of two European countries. Our analysis shows that EA should be framed within the institutional environment and governance aspects determine the adoption and diffusion of EA.
Below, I have inserted our original HICSS abstract. The new version of the paper that we are working on will focus more on the theoretical framework than the national case studies. I think we are on to something interesting here – so stay tuned ;-)
National enterprise architectures (NEA) promise to fill the gap between policy and implementation. NEAs are embedded within an institutional environment consisting of active players capable of responding strategically and innovatively to architectural initiatives, which might complicate NEA adoption. In this paper we analyze the efforts of two European national governments in developing enterprise architecture. Grounded in institutional theory and practice we develop an analytical framework and use this framework to analyze the fforts of two countries, Denmark and the Netherlands. Our framework and analysis draws the attention to the need to take a broader perspective on enterprise architecture, especially governance aspects determine the adoption and diffusion of NEA.
Posted by khm at 05:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 16, 2006
Crafting “Outside the Box” Articles
Preparing for an article jam session with my ITU colleagues later this week, I have been thinking and reading about what constitutes an interesting/innovative article. The short answer is that it must “think outside the box”. But what does that really mean?
From my perspective you must first understand the nature of the box that you are studying before you can think outside it: Thinking “outside the box” is about pointing out incomplete knowledge/literature about a specific phenomenon and extending (or replacing) this knowledge/literature with new insights. Some people will argue that you need to discard existing knowledge as wrong, misguided, or incorrect if you what to innovate. But, I don’t think so...
“Thinking outside the box” comes from understanding where the box is, problematizing it, and extended it. Lets see if I can do that this week :)
Posted by khm at 06:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 02, 2006
Final Call for Papers
I am co-editing a special issue on E-government Integration and Architecture in the International Journal of Cases on Electronic Commerce. The deadline for paper submission is May 31.
Contributed papers may deal with, but are not limited to:
- The development, implementation, control and maintenance of government integration projects.
- Different process, information systems and technology integration approaches
- Service-oriented architectures, web services, web service orchestration for public administration
- Semantic web applications
- Evaluation of case studies
- Technology alignments
- Barriers to integration
- Innovative applications and best practices
- Overview studies. Development within countries, policies, infrastructure facilities and so on
- Comparative studies (comparing countries)
- Enterprise architectures
Please consider submitting your work – the full call for papers can be found here.
Posted by khm at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 17, 2005
Meeting with John L. King (hi to Michael D. Cohen)
I was in Michigan yesterday to meet with Dean John L. King about my new paper. It was great to meet John again, and I got to say hi to the famous Dr. Michael D. Cohen who invented the Garbage Can Model for organizational choice...
As always, John’s insightful perspectives on my academic progress was brilliant. He always brings my views to a higher level of abstraction and he is a great academic role model for me. John has published more than 150 articles and five books on the relationship between technical and social change, so his horizon is incredible. We did not talk so much about the actual article, but spend most of our time discussing the enterprise architecture concept. John is (as many academics) very critical towards new buzzwords, and we talked about the mapping of the actual words “Enterprise” and “architecture” and the use of the word in public agencies. It was an interesting discussion that really made me rethink a couple of my quick conclusions about the nature of this beast.
Maybe EA is just old wine in new bottles? I do not think so, but it is a fact that EA does nothing if we just see it as another fad in the long history of abbreviations in the IT field. Based on my findings here in the US, John suggested a good distinction between the agencies what are “Performative” and “Transformative”. OMB compliance and slideware does not do the job alone – it is about taking EA seriously and transforming the way information systems planning is conducted!
Posted by khm at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 31, 2005
Summing Up: Understanding EA Management and Implementation in Government
My recent study of EA management and implementation in government illustrates the importance of understanding EAGov from an IS and e-government perspective. The e-government field emphasizes the distinct characteristics of government coordination and maturity stages that now call for vertical and horizontal back-office integration. And the IS literature emphasizes how IS researchers in the past have theorized about the global planning of IS in organizations. EA is not a new phenomenon with no heritage. EA stands on the shoulders of many years of IS research and it is important to acknowledge this heritage and not to let ourselves be blinded by the flashy, one-dimensional consultancy reports when we manage and implement EA’s in government. The e-government literature must study government in a systems perspective (cf. Grönlund & Horan, 2005) that emphasizes the importance of interoperability, standards, change management and reorganization when we want to improve the social aspects of e-government and strengthen the relation between government and citizens.
Many governments around the world are establishing EA programs to deal with interoperability and integration issues. The question is whether EA is the right medicine for public organizations. Rigorous EA frameworks, vague definitions and organizational adoption are some of the largest challenges. There are no guaranties for success. Tomorrow’s EA programs in government must encompass public sector dynamics (and limitations) as well as being agile in the application of interoperable e-government services.
Posted by khm at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 18, 2005
First Verion of My Status Report
The reason that my blog has been silent for a while is that I have been working hard to get my PhD-status report ready before I go to the US in September. The status report describes the current state of my 4-year PhD project initiated in February 2004. The main body of the report deals with the theoretical foundation for studying the use of enterprise architectures (EA) in government, while the appendix holds four articles produced in the first year of the PhD-program. The report is available here and I have inserted a table of contents below:
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Formal Report Requirements
1.2 Motivation and Research Focus
1.3 Project Background and Current Status
2. RESEARCH FIELD: UNDERSTANDING ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES IN GOVERNMENT
2.1 Electronic Government
2.2 Enterprise Architecture
2.3 Discussion and Implications
3. RESEARCH RESULTS
3.1 Paper I: Enterprise Architecture in Government – Towards a Multi-Level Framework for Managing IT in Government
3.2 Paper II: Extensible Architectures: The Strategic Value of Service-Oriented Architecture in Banking
3.3 Paper III: How To Make Government Agile to Cope with Organizational Change
3.4 Paper IV: Establishing Enterprise Architectures in Government: A Case Study on Interoperability
4. RESEARCH DESIGN: ENVISIONING THE THESIS AS A WHOLE
4.1 Research Process
4.2 New Institutional Theory
4.3 Outlining a Paper Model Dissertation
LIST OF REFERENCES
APPENDIX 1: ESTABLISHED ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORKS
APPENDIX 2: RESEARCH PAPERS I-IV
The final deadline for the status report is August 5. Please feel free to post your comments to the first version of the status on my blog or send me a mail.
Posted by khm at 09:10 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 13, 2005
Klitgaarden almost did the job…
I have just returned to Copenhagen from the PhD-course 'Write publishable research: An interactive process'. The course was held in the beautiful refugium Klitgaarden in Skagen.
As the title indicates, the course was about writing good academic papers with a clear research question. It was a very intense course with writing sessions during the day and lectures in the evening. But it was also a really great course where I managed to write 18 good pages (APA style) on a qualitative research paper. The paper explores the adoption of an enterprise architecture program in a government institution to understanding how and why public organizations use EAs to manage it-infrastructures. The research objective is to report insights into the impact of other EAs in the public sector in this process and to illustrate the interoperability considerations public institutions should include when organizing e-government information systems. I will be submitting the final paper to a journal or a conference some time soon.
Posted by khm at 04:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 15, 2005
Work in progress...
In February, I am attending the CBS PhD-course on Write publishable research. The course is targeted at improving the capability to describe the research question and the research process and results in a format that can be published in either journals or conferences. I have just submitted the following abstract:
Abstract: Interoperability and integration between different levels of government is one of the largest challenges governments around the world are facing today. While most e-government literature has focused on the simple online transactions between citizens and government, little research has investigated the theoretical and practical interoperability challenges that vertical and horizontal integration are confronting governments with when public institutions must work across the traditional “stove pipes” to provide integrated services for business and civilians. This paper investigates the various dimensions of e-government interoperability and integration that an individual institution is faced with when trying to coordinate IT-infrastructures across different levels of government. Based on literature about enterprise architecture and service-oriented architectures, interorganizational systems and institutional theory from the political science discipline the case study investigates the information systems coordination challenge between the national health sector in Denmark, the Copenhagen hospital region and Denmark’s largest hospital from different perspectives. Our findings illustrate that creating interoperability across different levels of government requires that we rethink the way we think about e-government systems development. Power is unevenly distributed between different public institutions and it is difficult to dictate/coordinate the organizational, semantic and technical interoperability. The interoperability problems arise because there is no overall coordination of different e-government initiatives in “stove pipes” and because different institutions, in sectors or on their own, often have no dimidiate incentives or opportunities to share data and functionality with other institutions.
Key words: Enterprise Architecture, e-Government, Service-oriented architecture, Interoperability, Health Care, IS management
As you can see, my research question for the article is still a bit fuzzy. Please feel free to comment on the abstract :-)
Posted by khm at 06:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack