A multi-level framework for measuring and benchmarking public service organizations: connecting stages-of-growth models and enterprise architecture

• Authors: Devender Maheshwari;Marijn Janssen;Anne Fleur van Veenstra
• Venue: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
• Year: 2011

Measuring and benchmarking the maturity of public service organizations is a challenging and time-consuming job as they differ in scope, size, and complexity. Existing growth models often use instruments that are generic, have no measures and do not relate the stages to the actual realisation of the systems architecture. Furthermore, these approaches take a one size fits all approach instead of a customized approach. Although the type of information to be measured can vary among different organizations, these approaches use similar instruments (e.g. stage models) and indicators (e.g. stages). Therefore, in this paper we propose a multi-level framework in which measures can be selected based on the domain and case specific needs and characteristics. Specifically, our framework focuses on measuring enterprise architecture, by looking at the blueprint for ICT infrastructure, information systems, organizational as well as technical aspects, horizontal and vertical integration and interoperability, and rules, regulations, laws, and legislations etc. Enterprise architecture provides basic understanding about the different elements of a public organization in a systematic manner. Therefore, this paper subsequently investigates the use of enterprise architecture and stages-of-growth models for measuring public organizations by means of an explorative case study of Dutch tax department using a multi-level architectural framework. The case study shows that the organizational information that can be retrieved from enterprise architecture is useful to measure and benchmark public organizations, which is hardly possible using state-of-growth models. The proposed multi-level framework is capable of measuring and benchmarking the information at the different levels by allowing public organizations to use multiple assessment approaches (e.g. stage models) and connecting them to enterprise architecture.