The role & function of enterprise architecture in e-Government

This paper presents the value of Enterprise Architecture with a focus on Business Architecture and gaps with the IT Architecture as government agencies develop their respective e-Government initiatives. (1) We discuss how to understand stakeholders and the processes involved which helps bridge the gap described within each agency's web site. We consider the impact of the frameworks on the agency's e-Government business model during the course of the architectural life cycle. Our approach is to analyze how EA is done in each agency, and technologies to determine the requirements and specifications for developing a cross-agency data or metadata repository enabling analysts to map agency frameworks against one another with the goal of creating a government-wide mechanism for exchanging EA information across agencies with diverse EA frameworks. This mechanism would support the migration towards a single government EA framework. Enterprise architectures are both mandated by Congress for federal agencies through the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, and are essential to the ability of an organization to evolve and develop new information systems that optimize mission value, in anticipation of and in response to change, We evaluate the quality and robustness of architectures in terms of rate of change tolerance and support of actual implementation of projects-timely cancellation of obsolete, effective re-planning of off track, and successful completion of on-target initiatives. As the primary motive for an integrated, interoperable Federal Enterprise Architecture framework is to transform the federal government for eGov, the key focus is the ability to define requirements for and accomplish an environment that is citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based. At the present time there are several alternative architecture frameworks that conform to the Clinger-Cohen Act. The act requires all federal agencies to establish an architecture program that integrates a process to select, control, and evaluate their IT investments. It calls for "an integrated framework for evolving or maintaining existing information technology and acquiring new information technology to achieve the agency's strategic It involves a rigorous research program that analyzes the planning, development, and implementation of different architecture frameworks and longitudinally follows their life cycle from the formulation of as-is realities to to-be states.