Systemic Enterprise Architecture as Future

Abstract

Governments are changing by design, necessity, and compulsion. This change is being exacerbated and shaped by megaforces that interact in a complex labyrinth of evolving nodes and connections. As a result, today’s government leaders and policy makers operate in a realm of confounding uncertainties and astounding complexities. These lead to incomplete and often non-actionable information that make decisions increasingly speculative. To unlock the grid and move forward, it is acknowledged that governments of the future have to be connected. Connected government is no utopia. It is simply a pragmatic approach to capitalize on complexity. Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a meta-discipline provides governments and leaders the means to address the twin challenges of dynamism and complexity. As governments become increasingly hyper-connected, they ought to be examined as systems, where holism, causality, heterarchy, and interrelationships are crucial to ensuring overall coherence in a state of omnipresent flux. This contrasts with the traditional fixation on efficiency and cost. Going beyond the rhetoric, this chapter demonstrates the value of amalgamating the systems approach within the EA methodology to address a national priority in Singapore, and provides insights to amplify the impact of EA by integrating creative thinking to tackle complex problems.