A recent NST news report titled “1GovEA to Boost Public Sector“, has Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) director-general Datuk Seri Zainal Rahim Seman on record, saying that Enterprise Architecture or EA is a structured approach to define an organisation through technology sharing, understanding, reconciling and planning across business, data, application and technology domains.
He said this when describing the One Government Enterprise Architecture (1GovEA) blueprint, a holistic ICT-business framework and methodology for guiding local public agencies in building their EA practices. He also emphasised the 1GovEA blueprint as necessary for all ministries and public agencies to adopt as Malaysia transitions towards being a developed country as well as a Digital Government with citizen-centric public service delivery.
Mampu is the central agency coordinating and maintaining 1GovEA. To date, there are 25 ministries and over 700 government agencies.
As EA is a culture, the 1GovEA implementation involves skills readiness and development of government employees through training and change management activities to prepare them for EA adoption to achieve Digital Government status.
The Mampu DG also described EA as a mechanism for the alignment of their business and ICT, to achieve “greater integration and collaboration among internal business entities and cross-agency entities.”
Moving from Computerisation to Digitalisation Era
Why the urgent need for Enterprise Architecture adoption right now?
ATD Solution Consulting’s Chief Architect Aaron Tan Dani said, “As we are now going through the transformation from the Computerisation era of the 90s to the era of Digital Transformation, so must the way we plan and deliver IT projects change as well.”
The Chief Architect explained that in the 90s till early 2010, the industry was focused on technology and project management, and moving from manual processing towards computerisation. As a result, integration, interoperability and ultimately future-proofing IT systems was overlooked.
Tan Dani said, “The issue now is that we are still practicing Computerisation era methods today. As a result, we see many islands of IT systems that are all in separate siloes and which causes the business challenge of getting right and timely information, as data is scattered everywhere with many different sources and in many different formats.”
He went on to add that today, a successful IT project only meant the delivery of hardware and software within the pre-defined scope, time and budget. “A typical experience may be that the business doesn’t really know the correct requirements either and ‘incomplete’ requirements lead to IT implementing ‘garbage’ systems!” Tan Dani pointed out.
He opined that one of the critical missing components in EA implementation today is the lack of a unified EA ‘language.’
“ArchiMate from the Open Group fills this gap in a timely manner as ArchiMate provides traceability from Business to Application Systems to Technology, and represents a Model of the Digital Enterprise as it evolves over time,” Tan Dani said.
To achieve this, ArchiMate helps to map the model of business strategy, current and desired capabilities as well as resources and their relationships across business domains, application and technology layers towards the end realisation of a Digital Enterprise, added Tan Dani.
Another important industry trend, the Internet of Things or IoT has a profound impact on how we run the Digital Enterprise as the physical and IT worlds are beginning to converge and ArchiMate language can help businesses and governments to describe the integration of billions and billions of physical facilities (‘things’ or sensors in IoT) and IT systems.
Tan Dani predicted that moving forward, the ArchiMate will have global mainstream adoption and application across enterprises and government bodies.
This has taken place already with the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA) that was defined by using ArchiMate and released recently.
Local public sector leads the way
Recognising the need for more cross-agency collaboration for improved public service delivery, Mampu had launched the 1GovEA blueprint, last October 2015.
Cross-agency collaboration allows agencies to streamline processes across agency boundaries and provides opportunity for information-sharing that support timely and relevant decision-making processes.
The central agency ultimately aims to transform Malaysia’s public service delivery this way, enabling public agencies to deliver consistent and timely services in a cost-effective manner to Malaysians, businesses and the public-at-large.
