Summary
The client, Department of Home Affairs’ duties and responsibilities of Affairs stem from the South African Constitution, various legislation, as well as other policy documents. The Department’s services are divided into two broad categories, Civic Services and Immigration Services.
Business Challenge
For the client, interoperability and integration of information systems (IS) had become an important vehicle for e-government success. No generic architecture was available that enabled communication between front and back-office applications, in between back-office applications, nor with systems outside the organization. The long-term goal of this EA consolidation is to limit both the heterogeneity of technological platforms and the diversity in products to reduce IT-costs.
Project Highlights
The enterprise architecture was implemented using three different approaches: analyzing literature, interviews and group discussions. A formal business case and full cost benefit analysis was created using the Enterprise Architecture model. A Model-driven architecture helped facilitate communication by graphically representing vast amounts of data into discrete views that could be reviewed and understood across different organizational groups and business areas. Our team chose to implement EA model, using its TOGAF® based EA repository to consolidate and manage EA information.
Benefits – These are the inputs we gathered as useful
- Reduced IT infrastructure complexity.
- Minimized IT duplication.
- Reduced system redundancy.
- Increased standardization.
- Front to Back office coordination and business processes improved.
Learnings – These are the inputs we gathered as useful
- You can only move as fast as the business
- Deliver a project where the business can easily understand the benefits
- Make sure you retain technical staff if you outsource, they hold a lot of info
- An enterprise architecture can only work if IT has reached the right level of maturity