E-government system architecture design guided by an e-government development process and an enterprise architecture framework

Abstract

Projects contracted by government mostly use rigid software development methods. The procedure followed is that analysts decompose functions from requirements, divide them into components and give to software developers to produce a system. In this respect functional decomposition is likely to coincide with each other, causing constraints on the architecture, thus depriving them of a true software computation environment to develop the software system. Designing the architecture of a system before development ensures that applications are comprehended, and the enterprise activities and system context are understood. Architecture promotes considerable interaction among the user, the procurer, and the developer. Using a regimented method of structural design facilitates stakeholders understanding of the operations, system, and technological aspects of what they have to manage. Designing e-Government system architecture is one of the major activities in e-Government implementation process. Challenges faced by governments in making the effort of putting an e-Government system in place and making it run are the same worldwide. This is due to the lack of a process to guide the implementation. Little attention has been put into defining a generic process that is flexible and widely usable. Therefore one of the tasks of this thesis is to research and propose a generic e-Government development process. The thesis goal is to design e-Government system architecture. However there are several steps to the actual system architecture design. In this respect our first task was to propose an e-Government development process. The developed process guided in the eliciting e-Government requirements. The eliciting of the requirements was vital because the design of e-Government system architecture was to use these requirements. To design an e-Government system architecture that is aligned to business, we required a guiding framework. Since existing frameworks were developed ...