Research context and Background
Organizations and institutions today confront different challenges involving the need to address a rapidly changing environment due to technology advancements, the need to integrate information technology into traditional functions, the need to adopt new organizational models, and the need to adapt to globalization. Institutions and organizations must promote innovation in this environment to adapt quickly to the market needs while exploiting the new situations proactively to develop new opportunities (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). Such situations require enterprise management to support correct decisions, address complex challenges, and deal with diverse concerns and stakeholders. The new practice of enterprise architecture (EA) can help leaders and managers to adapt to their environment and make decisions rapidly. Consequently, EA can be defined as a practice that focuses on aligning technology, processes, and people to support the strategy, vision, and mission of an organization (Lankhorst, 2017). Organizations use the practice to describe essential structural elements such as technology, application, process, and information assets and the way they use these assets to ensure optimized operations.
EA aims to provide action based and ready suggestions to leaders to enable them to alter projects and policies and attain their goals. It does this by describing the process of transforming organizational strategy and vision into an effective change through improving, communicating, and creating models, standards, and policies that describe the future state of the organization and support its evolution (Lankhorst, 2017). The EA definition emphasizes the importance of technology, information, processes, and people of the organization in addition to the relationship between them and the outside settings (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). In turn, this generates pragmatic and tangible results to define the future state of the organization. It also enables stakeholders to analyze gaps between the current state and the future state, which allows them to develop the required path to address the gaps and support the evolution of the organization (find). The EA process, therefore, produces holistic descriptions about the organization over time to offer holistic insights and information required to support effective decision making and ensure an effective, efficient, and agile organization.
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Significance of the Study
It is important to study EA because research on EA will help stakeholders understand various applications of EA, its benefits, factors that enhance successful EA implementation, and any involved challenges. For example, some organizations may just want to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness by changing their daily operations in which they can use EA to facilitate the changes. Nevertheless, such organizations will not achieve anything if they do not implement the identified approaches, principles, and models or include them as part of the operations in the organization. In turn, this necessitates a vigorous governance apparatus to ensure that the organization complies with the EA process and the organization integrates the process in different functions such as project management, program management, and strategy to enhance the sharing of common strategic objectives (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). Thus, it is important to study EA to gain insights into the practices, the scope of the EA process, and help organizations understand the areas they need to focus on to obtain optimal benefits. Studying EA also helps organizations to gain a better understanding of the way different practices are interconnected, which enables them to manage interdependencies, interactions, and relationships. In turn, this offers adequate information and supports effective decisions.
Problem and Motivation behind the study
It is important to implement EA because EA enhances organizational processes and operations, which increase business performance. Operational activities in organizations require and consume significant resources and EA contributes positively by supporting organizational effectiveness and efficiency, which enhance quick product and service delivery (Ansyori et al., 2018). EA also enables better management of resources and assets to achieve optimal outcomes by assisting organizations to adhere to the set quality principles, standards, and other regulations (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). For instance, better management can be achieved through increasing staff skills and knowledge or efficient management of complex organizational operations. In turn, this decreases risk, increases the ability of the organization to transform, and enhances organizational continuity.
Another benefit of EA is that it facilitates better alignment between organizational strategies and stakeholders and between different departments within the organization (Ansyori et al., 2018). For example, EA enables organizations to address customer needs, offers a path to support strategic decision-making, and facilitates the management of long-term investments in the organization. The benefits allow the organization to create and maintain its competitive advantage. Additionally, EA enhances the responsiveness, flexibility, and agility of the organization towards transformation in the future (Ansyori et al., 2018). These benefits are realized because of the ability of EA to help the organization identify and use IT benefits; facilitate the integration and interoperability between information technology infrastructures; enhance the security, stability, and reusability of IT infrastructure; improve IT infrastructure standardization; and decrease redundancy. In turn, this reduces costs, facilitates deployment of IT resources, and supports project initialization.
Moreover, EA supports organizations in maintaining and creating common objectives and facilitates effective communication between stakeholders by providing adequate and relevant information (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). Effective communication enhances collaboration between stakeholders, supports organizational learning, enhances sharing of information, and offers a holistic organizational view.
There are aslo different types of EA denoting diverse business elements. The major types include Business architecture, data architecture, application architecture, and technical architecture (Lankhorst, 2017). The business architecture acts as the basis of a positive outcome of the entire EA and describes the required objectives, operational models, business approach, and business drivers to transform the organization into a disruptive and competitive environment. EA architects usually base their descriptions on the business architecture and use it to guide the intended organizational outcomes. Besides, the business architecture describes the target and baseline architectures and defines the needed transitions to be implemented. The data architecture is essential to an effective EA because the components of other architectures create, consume, and destroy data and the data architecture describes the way the business is structured based on logical and physical data assets. Therefore, it is critical to understand the organizational processes and functions using data, the applications recording data, the location of data creation and destruction, and the technical components storing and manipulating the data to ensure successful organizational outcomes. The data architecture typically describes the target and baseline architectures and defines a series of transitions that can be implemented.
The application architecture offers a list of enterprise applications and describes their role in storing, transmitting, and transforming data. It also defines the required interfaces or the applications provided interfaces and the interaction between applications to perform the described activities in the business architecture. It defines the interfaces, the application catalog, and the interaction matrices and diagrams once at the enterprise level. In turn, this creates an inventory of current artifacts that architects can use to develop new architectures and classify them as the standard and the intended future architecture. Thus, the application architecture describes the standard and target architectures and defines the required transitions that can be implemented. The technical architectures support other architectures by describing the virtual, physical, and logical infrastructure that facilitate the implementation of application service to reinforce business and information services and functions.
Organizations can also implement EA in four major ways. For example, an organization can choose The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), The Zachman Framework, Federal Enterprise Architectural Framework (FEA), or the Gartner Framework (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). The TOGAF model is popular within organizations and has the required components. It features a common vocabulary, the suggested compliance techniques and standards, recommended tools and software, and a best practice definition technique. TOGAF use the Architectural Development Method (ADM) to demonstrate the required keys and steps to create architecture.
The Zachman Framework emphasize the role of the taxonomy technique in organizing different materials and documents into suitable categories. The model provides structural links into various enterprise aspects using six-player views and six descriptive foci. The views include enterprise, sub-contractor, builder, designer, owner, and planner while the foci include motivation, time, people, network, function, and data. These points create an inter-connective web to develop a model that demonstrates optimal organization operations. In turn, this results in effective decision making in the organization.
The FEA is a new model that helps in the alignment of different organizations and agencies under single institutional control. It features five reference models covering data, technical, components, service, and business that combine with a segment model to offer a view regarding the best way to install EA.
The Gartner model highlights the importance of adapting constantly to the surrounding environment by focusing on diverse moving parts into a single vision and objective. The model suggests the combination of technology implementers, information specialists, and business owners into one entity to address issues.
Each EA framework supports different business structures. However, the essential components of EA include description advice involving viewpoint library or architecture artifacts map, process advice including architecture development technique and a guide; and organization advice involving a governance model for EA (Saint-Louis et al., 2019). Additionally, an effective EA framework should have enterprise communication, EA maturity, and EA initiative models besides the metrics for measuring business value. Through implementing EA, the Qatari government will benefit through better financial performance by decreasing organizational costs and improving the collection of revenue; improved economic development by encouraging the growth of local and national economies, and decreased redundancy due to the integration, reduction, and consolidation of government systems (Thirasakthana & Kiattisin, 2021). EA in Qatar will also support improved government service delivery by allowing authorities to offer integrated and consistent public and customer services to key stakeholders and the population irrespective of political affiliation. Consequently, an effective EA delivers benefits in various areas simultaneously.
Research Question
How to effectively implement enterprise architecture in Qatar’s government?
Aim of the Study
The field of research will be in Qatar, in the government sector. The focus will be on exploring the factors that contribute to successful EA implementation and understanding any challenges that may hinder successful implementation. It is worth noting that the government must communicate its EA work to all the relevant stakeholders both in the government and outside the government to ensure successful implementation. Besides, interoperability should be the main objective of the EA even though it can be challenging to achieve interoperability between and within organizations in the government. However, the presence of a centralized governance structure ensures better interoperability as the structure allows stakeholders to assess the benefits of the EA (Thirasakthana & Kiattisin, 2021). It should be clear to stakeholders that the EA is good for them because trust among stakeholders eases the implementation. Stakeholders must also possess an open mind towards the EA to avoid hindering successful implementation. Besides, the implementation of EA requires a multifaceted approach since diverse components affect successful implementation.
Thus, it is important to first identify the EA objectives before the implementation stage to ensure all the required components are included. Additionally, failure to set measurable and clear objectives when implementing EA in the government makes it challenging to gain the benefits of EA and hinders EA advancement in the government. The top officials or management must be committed to the EA implementation to anchor EA in the government by being aware of the EA and working collaboratively. Moreover, cultural components within the organization must be considered when implementing EA to ensure that the EA fit the culture of the organization (Ansyori, Qodarsih, & Soewito, 2018). Therefore, it is vital to know the success factors when implementing EA because these factors help the organization achieve EA benefits.
References
Ansyori, R., Qodarsih, N., & Soewito, B. (2018). A systematic literature review: Critical Success Factors to Implement Enterprise Architecture. Procedia Computer Science , 135 , 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.08.148
Lankhorst, M. (2017). Enterprise Architecture at Work . Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Saint-Louis, P., Morency, M. C., & Lapalme, J. (2019). Examination of explicit definitions of enterprise architecture. International Journal of Engineering Business Management , 11 , 184797901986633. https://doi.org/10.1177/1847979019866337
Thirasakthana, M., & Kiattisin, S. (2021). Sustainable Government Enterprise Architecture Framework. Sustainability , 13 (2), 879. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020879
