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Volume 3 Issue 4 December 2005
Stages of Growth in e-Government: An Architectural Approach
Marijn Janssen and Anne Fleur van Veenstra, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology
MarijnJ@tbm.tudelft.nl
AnneFleur@gmail.com |
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Governmental agencies from all over the world are in various stages of development to migrate their traditional systems architectures to more horizontally and vertically integrated architectures. The development of information architecture can evolve through a number of phases or stages of growth. Stages of growth are premised on the idea that organizations pass through the notional stages of maturity or sophistication. A number of stage models are available, however, all of these models can be criticised for offering no guidance to actually addressing technology aspects.
In this paper a stages of growth model for the development of information architectures for local governmental agencies is presented. By analyzing discontinuities in the information architectures for coordinating back and front office applications five stages are derived. Our five-stage model consists of 1) no integration, 2) one-to-one messaging, 3) warehouse, 4) broker and 5) orchestrated broker architecture. In the last stage, the information flows between systems are coordinated and business logic is included to create workflows. Our growth stage model enables the gradual expansion from no integration architecture, via an architecture coordinating back and front office applications, to an architecture coordinating complete business processes and interactions with external systems. In the higher stages the emphasis gradually shifts from technology to organizational processes and structures.
Although descriptive in nature, these stages can potentially also be used in a prescriptive manner. Public decision-makers can use these stages as a guidance and direction in architecture development, to reduce the complexity of the progression of e-government initiatives, to communicate changes to the rest of the organization and to provide milestones to evaluate and control cost of architecture development.
Keywords:
Information architecture, local government, stage models, coordination, information broker, web service orchestration
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