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For Business Architecture (BA) to provide the intended benefits there should be considerable focus on the components that deliver the real architectural value. Current trends focus on the business process component of Business Architecture and tend to consider BPM as an architectural style for its modeling. As the major concern of enterprises is value creation to customers in terms of services, considering business processes as a hub mixes the concerns of service specifications and how it is provided. For Business Architecture to serve the generation of subsequent artifacts in the Enterprise Architecture (EA), we suggest that business services should be the focal point and appropriate architectural style should be adopted. This paper presents methodologies we developed adopting the SOA architectural style to model business services, and created Service Oriented Business Service Model (SOBSM) and applied it on the portfolio of business services standardized across a given enterprise ecosystem. As well, we suggest that the resulting SOBSM be used for generating the subsequent components of the EA spectrum.

In order to enable business agility, different architectural styles for organizing information systems, business and technology have emerged. Architecture involves top-level management, the business entities in the organization down to the grass-root level views. While the values of both Service Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Architecture are emerging in industry, the IT based organizations have no clear guidance on how to use these two sets of architectural approaches together.In the same token, enterprises and architecture practitioners strongly need a reference model and guideline to legitimate, rationalize, and justify courses of action taken in their business systems architecture and design. This research work proposes a new approach referred to as Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA) framework to address this enterprise need. SOEA framework attempts to resolve the limitations that arise when Enterprise Architecture (EA) and SOA approaches are used independently. This framework, therefore, links an SOA style with the EA process to realize and help organizations benefit from SOA effort as a key part of their Enterprise Architecture.

Governments around the world have acknowledged the complexity associated with public sector transformation and have initiated enterprise architecture programs to help manage those complexities and enable the desired strategic transformation. Along with the EA program, governments have adopted some sort of EA framework and/or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) individually or in integrated form. However, the majority of those EA programs are of limited scope in both EA and SOA practices, and are not comprehensive enough to deal with and manage the associated complexities. As a result, those EA programs suffer from the inability to leverage EA and SOA benefits across agencies or jurisdictional boundaries. Currently, the majority of government agencies use EA and SOA within the agency boundaries to deliver solutions by focusing on technical factors that define detailed blueprints of systems, data, and technology. What is needed rather is effective Whole-of-Government Enterprise Architecture (EA) that facilitates the alignment of individual agencies’ visions with the Whole-of-Government vision to enable sustainable government transformation. Research has pointed out that the Whole-of-Government EA is currently at the conceptual level and still has a long way to go to reach the maturity level required for value realization. This chapter first gives a brief analysis of the current state of enterprise architecture in governments to highlight the current challenges. It then discusses the various scopes of Whole-of-Government EA and recommends the plausible EA approach to enable sustainable connected government based on The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and SOA.