Digital Government Ecosystem: Adaptive Architecture for Digital and ICT Investment Decision Making

Agencies, while operating in the federated digital government ecosystem, need to make significant investments in digital and information and communication technology (ICT) for providing services to people and businesses. A whole-of-government adaptive architecture driven approach seems appropriate for supporting common language and consistent digital and ICT investment decision making. It enables adaptive planning and implementation with a view to make an optimal use of public funds and aligned with the strategic direction and priorities in digital and ICT investments. However, the challenge is how to establish the adaptive architecture for supporting digital and ICT investment decision making in the complex and federated digital government ecosystem. This paper proposes the adaptive enterprise architecture (AEA) meta-framework for digital ecosystems, as a lens, to systematically integrate the Australian Government Architecture (AGA), and Digital and ICT Oversight Investment Framework (IOF) in establishing the adaptive architecture for assisting digital and ICT investment decisions within complex digital government ecosystems. The proposed approach is demonstrated and evaluated with the help of an example scenario for an Australian digital government service. The results of this study indicate that the adaptive architecture driven approach involving AGA and IOF seems useful for architecting and supporting complex digital and ICT investment decision making to deliver the holistic outcomes of data and digital government strategy objectives.