EA Modeling - Government
There are many reasons for engaging in an Enterprise Architecture effort. What I find interesting is that often different organizations in different industries place different emphasis on these drivers.
For the next few blog entries, I’d like to look at how the motivations for modeling, especially EA modeling, differ between different industries as a result of the different goals and constraints that they have. Today I’ll start with governmental agencies.
To state the obvious, the key point about a governmental entity is that they are a monopoly that is (at least in theory) there to serve the needs of the electorate.
So I often find a strong emphasis on aligning initiatives with the stated top-level objectives of the organization – the ‘classic’ EA story. This is possibly helped by the fact that most governmental organizations do explicitly state their objectives.
A second reason is transparency of IT investments. As others have observed recently, sometimes an EA effort becomes a simple matter of documenting a current state. But in this case, it’s an explicit and valued activity, in that it speaks to visibility of IT decisions.
There is a final area of emphasis that I’m seeing more and more, which I find the most interesting – adoption of a shared services model. There’s an increasing move to adopting a shared service model here in North America, whether at the state level or the national level (e.g. Shared Services Canada).
So – in the governmental organizations that I see we have three main drivers – alignment with the organization’s objectives, transparency of investments and support for shared services models.