Adopting CEAF

Introduction

The adoption of the collaborative enterprise architecture framework (CEAF) within a current government environment requires careful and focused planning. A big-bang approach, where government departments suddenly move from their current systems to new common systems, will not work. The change must be planned and implemented in an iterative approach, where there is an option to resolve a present pressing need without compromising on the future state of architecture. The CEAF provides a mechanism to optimise the use of legacy systems. This approach provides the mechanism to adopt a phased implementation of the CEAF. The CEAF should take a pragmatic approach, where the end state is defined, and many phased decisions are made to achieve it in a planned manner.

A political cycle of elections held within a government term drives its departments. Commitments made by the ruling party to its electorate during the elections drive its focus and direction.

The following criteria should be kept in mind when planning the adoption of CEAF:

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  Legacy systems should be modified in a planned approach, as and when opportunity arises to do so.

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  The initial adoption of the CEAF must be as a pilot with only a few data entities or systems involved in the beginning.

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  The CEAF must be planned and implemented in an incremental format

Adopting Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Framework

The adoption of the CEAF at the government level will require overall alignment of government and individual agencies or departments with the framework, which will also require government-wide enterprise architecture and a defined end state. For this initiative, the government must set up a business capability-based services framework. Business capabilities are the way in which enterprises combine resources, competencies, information, processes, and their environment, to deliver consistent services to citizens. They are used to describe what the government does, and what it will need to do differently in response to strategic challenges and opportunities. Thinking in terms of business capabilities is one of the ways organisations understand and express how they combine technologies and processes to deliver value. What makes business-capability modelling unique is its focus on what the business does in the present timeframe, and what must change so that the new Web-based technologies do not dismantle the working of the government, but allow it to make use of the opportunities inherent in these new technologies. The information-services development for such services will require two levels of decision making. At the whole-of-government level, the enterprise information services should be able to define the context and level of security required for service outcomes; on the individual-organisation level, the currency of information and source systems must be defined. In some cases, the information service may not be a pure service. It might provide data to the servicing layer. Figure 1 depicts an overall information-services framework. The enterprise-wide services may be provided entirely by a participating agency or department, or performed at the CEAF common-services level by aggregating the information from various sources. The services architecture must have the following components defined: