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Opponent Professor Tero Päivärinta (University of Oulu) and Custos Professor Mikko Siponen (Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥). The doctoral dissertation is held in English.

The audience can follow the dissertation online.
Link to the Zoom Webinar (Zoom application or Google Chrome web browser recommended):

Phone number to which the audience can present possible additional questions at the end of the event (to the custos): +358 50 5588128

Coherency Management by Architecture? Adapting Enterprise Architecture Framework for the Finnish Government Ecosystem

Public sector in the West has been exposed to government reforms for a long time. On-going public reforms do not report very high success rates, e.g. concerning digitalization. Public administration (PA) consists of administrative units at national, regional or local levels with various cross-dependencies. Government coherency refers here to a logical, orderly and consistent relation of the parts of the government to the whole. According to Zachman it is impossible to change a complex entity without descriptions of the current state - to facilitate this, enterprise architecture has been approached. Enterprise architecture (EA) has been used to describe and design the business operations, information systems, data structures, and technology platforms of enterprises. The knowledge on EA best practices is scattered, though. Since in PA differs from private businesses, e.g. by the mission and business logic, there is a need to study the adaptation and application of the EA in PA. In the study, we explored how the EA framework (EAF) should be adapted in the government ecosystem for coherency management.

The study consists of two consecutive case studies in Finland, a national EA method development project and EA development in Kouvola City. In the first, the adaption model of the Finnish national EA framework was constructed. The model was evaluated in the second case study, where it was applied and developed by abductive logic of reasoning. We propose that EAF should be further developed conceptually and practically in order to present the current state EA information and descriptions in relation to the prevailing management structures, beyond other categorizations of the EA framework. In this way, EAF of the current state information would serve as data model of the current state management structures in the government ecosystem, and allow analyses of the EA contents in relation to many more aspects than currently. This should be supported by a common real-time EA information system in order to support the analyses of the as-is government ecosystem. To facilitate the vision, it might require a common contextual ontology of the PA as ecosystem. The study follows abductive logic of reasoning and presents the ‘next best explanation' based on the available data, and therefore the validation of the results require further studies.