Systematic literature review on enterprise architecture in the public sector

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) is an approach to improve the alignment between the organization’s business and their information technologies. It attempts to capture the status of the organizations’ business architecture, information resources, information systems, and technologies so that the gaps and weaknesses in their processes and infrastructures can be identified, and development directions planned. For this reason, EA has become a popular approach also in the public sector to increase their efficiency and ICT utilization. Yet researchers have largely ignored this context, and it seems that quite little is known about how EA is developed, implemented, or adapted in different countries and in the public sector. We thus conducted a systematic literature review to identify the major research topics and methods in studies focusing on public sector EA. We analyzed 71 identified articles from the past 15 years. Our analysis shows that the development viewpoint, case studies in developed countries, and local settings seem to form mainstream EA research in the public sector. Taken together, it seems that public sector EA is scattered, and there is no strong, single research stream. Instead the researchers conduct local case studies. This means the knowledge on EA development, implementation or adaptation, their challenges and best practices does not accumulate. There is consequently a need for more research in general, and targeted research in some specific segments.