Enterprise Architecture Descriptions for Enhancing Local Government Transformation and Coherency Management

Abstract

Local governments cover multiple service sectors and are typically organized into diversified, deeply hierarchical organizations. Public services offered are tangible, mostly non-IT-critical, and heavily dependent on human resources. Information management is mainly manual in strategy and management processes. In this case study of a large Finnish local government organization, enterprise architecture (EA) is proposed as a tool for improving the coherency of the local government and its alignment to IT and other resources. We ask, what kind of EA descriptions local government agencies need for coherency management, and how to organize them. We apply action design research principles at the Kouvola City concern by adapting the Finnish Government EA Grid there. The business architecture is unfolded to evaluate the target state for a planned change. The results give new insights into transformation of the local government towards new public management related operation models, government-IT alignment, and further development of EA description tools and repositories for public administration use.