Building on the belief that a positive correlation between the desired level of e-government capability and maturity and the required level of architectural maturity exists, the eGovernment Authority (eGA) of the kingdom of Bahrain embarked on a three-year eGovernment program aimed at improving service delivery to citizens through seamless integration and connected governance. In order to achieve this objective, eGA realized the need for a Kingdom-wide strategy and holistic guiding plans, and hence decided to design and develop a National Enterprise Architecture Framework (NEAF). NEAF is an aggregation of models and meta-models, governance, compliance mechanisms, technology standards, and guidelines put together to guide effective development and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture by different government entities across the Kingdom. This chapter will describe a NEAF development project success story, its objectives, and its importance to Bahrain’s economic vision 2030. It describes the NEAF development lifecycle and highlights the findings and challenges faced at each stage of the project.
TopProject Objective And Scope
EA is practiced in many industries; private and public sectors. It is very important before embarking an EA project that the objectives to be achieved are defined clearly. As a trend, EA could serve different objectives: to lower the cost of IT, fix its effectiveness, fix its strategic value, use IT to generate new strategic value or in many cases to transform the business with IT. For instance, EA could help with coping legacy complexity and cost, reintegrating the supply chain, integrating public services, enhancing channel capabilities, or even delivering better customer service.
The main objective of NEAF is to assist the kingdom of Bahrain to design, develop, deploy, and use enterprise architecture for better strategies, processes, plans, structures, technologies, and systems across the government entities for successful implementation of e-Government. Specifically, in case of Bahrain, the focus was to:
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Simplify and speed up services deployment to citizens
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Diversify services delivery channels
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Ease and improve integration between various ministries and government authorities.
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Achieve cost benefits of consolidation and standardization. Hence, reinvest the savings into modernizing the service delivery and provide more innovative services to citizens