Stages of Growth in e-Government: An Architectural Approach

Governmental agencies from all over the world are in various stages of development to migrate their traditional systems architectures to more horizontally and vertically integrated architectures. In this paper a stages of growth model for the development of information architectures for local governmental agencies is presented. By analyzing discontinuities in the architectures coordinating back and front office applications five stages are derived. The five-stage model consists of 1) no integration, 2) one-to-one messaging, 3) warehouse, 4) broker and 5) orchestrated broker architecture. Public decision-makers can use these stages as a guidance and direction in architecture development, to reduce the complexity of the progression of e-government initiatives, to communicate changes to the rest of the organization and to provide milestones to evaluate and control cost of architecture development.