MyGovEA is a significant agenda initiated by MAMPU as the catalyst to drive the current government’s transformation agenda and the way government agencies will approach the development of business and ICT strategies in the future.

Convergence of Business and Technology Strategy

MyGovEA is positioned as the framework the public sector agencies could adopt to ensure the alignment between the business and technology strategy of the organisation. As EA provides the tools for agencies to define both their business and ICT segments of the organisation, it is the perfect method for agencies to outline the business and ICT strategies of the organisation. This is to correspond with their roles in contributing towards achieving the agency’s business vision and mission.

Agencies adopting MyGovEA framework and methodology shall be able to leverage on the EA practices to shape and drive not just future business and ICT planning initiatives but be able to leverage on EA practices to approach and solve business challenges as well. Through the adoption of MyGovEA, agencies will be able to embark on developing the business and technical strategy as a single initiative. A joint business and technical strategy will allow agencies to develop a consolidated future business and technical direction by understanding the current architecture and defining the future or envisioned architecture of the organisation.

Strengthening Cross-agency Collaborations

Cross-agency collaboration initiatives are meant to further improve the government service delivery. Cross-agency collaboration allows agencies to streamline processes across the agency boundaries and explore opportunities for information sharing to support decision making processes. MyGovEA is the perfect tool for agencies to further the cross-agency collaboration agenda. For instance, as agencies begin developing the EA practices, each agency will gain an overarching view of its businesses capabilities.

MAMPU as the central agency coordinating and maintaining MyGovEA shall be able to leverage on this information to form a more holistic view of the present business and ICT landscape in terms of supporting the business capabilities of the public sector agencies. This holistic view will allow MAMPU to identify potential opportunities for future cross-agency collaboration initiatives in areas such as information sharing, data mining and analysis, application and infrastructure consolidation, and shared services.

Re-enforcing Capability Development in the Public Sector

The adoption of EA practices will further drive the knowledge and capability development of both the business and ICT communities in the public sector. MyGovEA will require agencies to have a pool of resources (the enterprise architects) who are able to appreciate the complexity of both the business and technical environment of their organisation and in turn be able to approach any architecture-related initiatives. Hence, among the first step in the journey towards establishing EA practices in the public sector is to develop programmes for enriching identified resources in the public sector agencies with knowledge and skills on enterprise architecture, MyGovEA and project management. In this respect, the establishment of the Central Office of the Architect in MAMPU is the first step to formalize the role of enterprise architects in the public sector. The Central Office of the Architect is formed to act as the public sector enterprise architect team where one if its role is to assist other public sector agencies to develop enterprise architects in their organisation.

The plan to develop EA capabilities in the public sector will be a collaborative initiative. For a start, MAMPU is working together with INTAN to identify and develop courses and programmes to build skills and capabilities for public sector agencies to embark on building their EA practices based on MyGovEA.

Realigning MyGovEA in the Public Sector with ISP

ICT Strategic Planning (ISP) is an initiative undertaken by the public sector agencies to chart the strategic direction of the agency in terms of its ICT development. The initiative covers four (4) main elements namely:

• Assess current business environment (Business “As-Is” study).
• Assess current ICT environment (ICT “As-Is” study).
• Develop ICT strategy (“To-Be” ICT environment).
• Develop implementation plan.

With the introduction of MyGovEA, there is a need for MAMPU to re-align both initiatives. Both EA and ISP are similar in the way organisation approach its implementation.

For instance, in both initiatives, agencies will conduct current state assessment, define its target state and develop the implementation roadmap. Nevertheless both EA and the present ISP methodology in the public sector also differ from the perspective of the scope and the level of details captured when agencies embark on either of the initiative. ISP will typically deals with developing a strategy and operating model of an ICT Department while EA is about defining the holistic landscape of the organisation (business, data, application and technology environment). Hence the level of details gathered when developing an ISP will be less compared to when agency builds an EA practice.