Enterprise architectures and organizations: Analysing and designing their social and cultural interactions

How are social and cultural aspects of public organizations considered by enterprise architects and how are they incorporated by them in their designs? The research objective was to explore this in the context of e-government. The aim of this study was to develop knowledge to enhance the consideration and incorporation of these aspects of public organizations in enterprise architecture designs. A sequential mixed research method was used to investigate this. Two case studies were included in the study. An expert panel and a survey were included to assess the level of transferability of the case study findings. A literature review of socio-technical design research was conducted to create a research framework containing a set of social and cultural aspects of organizations that should be considered by designers. The research data demonstrated that the selected social and cultural aspects of organizations get hardly any attention: they are valued as aspects of organizations, but are not regarded as design parameters by enterprise architects. The rationalist nature of the enterprise architecture discipline conduces to an engineering perspective on e-government, governmental organizations and organizational life, and promotes an emphasis on what is programmable. Ten factors and their interrelationships have been found which had an impact on the incorporation of social and cultural aspects of public organisations by enterprise architects in their designs. An enterprise architecture evaluation method was developed that can be used in a design process to determine which social and cultural aspects of an organization had been considered and incorporated in the design.

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