A Complex Adaptive System Perspective of Enterprise Architecture in Electronic Government

Within the public sector, the deployment of enterprise architecture is often an attempt to address the decentralization/centralization relationships to improve the links between the central and the local governments. The underlying aim is to provide a better structure to manage the diverse, independent and local IT-related projects and development activities. In this paper we propose a novel approach to analyzing and understanding the requirements and limitations for enterprise architectures in government. We use the perspective of a complex adaptive system as a metaphor to examine 11 e-government projects with each involved the development of enterprise architecture in the Netherlands (1980s - 2004). Through analyzing the key interaction points between the central and the local governments, we identify architectural design principles that will increase interorganizational jointness and IT implementation success.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen