Organizations have adopted Enterprise Architecture (EA) for managing their IT-landscape and ensuring coherence among projects and activities. There is much work about approaches, methods, and tools for EA based on the assumption that their use will create business value. However, the failure of many EA efforts results in the need to investigate the factors influencing EA failure in practice. In this paper, we used a literature review to identify ten EA failure factors. Then we employed the grey-DEMATEL method to explore and analyze the influence of the ten EA failure factors based on the input of five EA experts. The result shows that failure factors are not in isolation, and they can be divided into either causal or effect factors. The factors do not have equal importance but differ in the levels of influence. For the causal factors, the ranking from most to least important is the inability to handle complexity, lack of proven EA methodology, lack of EA knowledge, lack of communication, and lack of tools. For the effect factors, the factors are a lack of support, too high effort, lack of motivation, parallel processes, and unused artifacts. We recommend practitioners to pay more attention to the five causal factors in their EA efforts. Further research is needed to generalize the findings, to understand the dependencies among factors, and to take into account situational dependency of EA failure.

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Governments across the word are under pressure to adopt new technologies and to innovate and transform their processes. Some governments have introduced the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to facilitate these innovations though adoption of new technologies. The traditional CIO role of improving operational efficiency is now shifting towards exploring new IT-enabled opportunities required in digital transformation. In this context, CIO capabilities are expanding to be more involved in administrative processes and digital transformation, however, their organizational role seem to lag behind. This paper is aimed at evaluating the current role of CIOs and to provide policy recommendations to strengthen their role. Data was collected during a session in which roles and capabilities of CIOs were discussed. In particular, we found that often the CIO was positioned as having an IT role, whereas a more organizational role was needed. CIOs should develop capabilities to support digital transformation and to develop architecture that is adaptive and agile. The expectations of the CIO and the role of the CIO need to be better aligned.

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Governments from all over the world are struggling to take advantage of big data developments. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be used as an instrument to integrate big data (BD) in the existing business processes and ICT-landscape. In this policy paper, we explore the role of EA in the adoption of BD. For this, we adopted a qualitative case study approach and investigated a large administrative organization that was in the process of adopting BD. We found in our case study that the first attempts were focused on integrating big data in the current landscape, but this encountered too many challenges that halt progress. To overcome the challenges, a separate BD department and accompanying infrastructure was created. The strategy was first to reap the benefits of BD and to understand what should be done, and thereafter integrating the working systems in the existing landscape. The findings suggest that current infrastructures might not be suitable for integrating BD and substantial changes are needed first. In the case the role of BD needed to be first clarified before EA could play a role in adopting BD. EA should deal with the uncertainties and complexities by ensuring a configurable landscape, by providing an incremental approach for adapting the infrastructure step-by-step, before the benefits of big data can be gained. Developing an incremental migration plan was found to be a key aspect for the adoption of BD.

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The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new development of social BPM is expected to provide benefits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive processes, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on policy-making. We first present a literature survey showing that social BPM is a new and emerging research area and limited attention has been given to social BPM in egovernment. The literature reviews showed a lack of empirical research into the accomplished benefits of social BPM. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive case study in a Dutch government social BPM platform was conducted. While not all the benefits suggested in the literature were identified in the case study, negative impact of social BPM were also found. A tension was found between accomplishing flexibility and accountability and user efficiency. @en