The Role of Services in Governmental Enterprise Architectures – The Case of the German Federal Government

In the public sector, information technology (IT) as means to support governmental processes is as important as in industry today. Delivering high quality eGovernment services requires an efficient and effective IT support. This IT support can only be provided if the requirements specified in the processes are correctly and completely transformed into IT solutions. Services are seen as major means to support this transformation. In this chapter, we propose a method which systematically translates business processes into services. The method contains 1) a data model describing the structure of the work products of the method, 2) a technique for emergent data modeling, which allows its users to customize the data model according to the government’s needs, 3) a role model describing the required competencies for each step, and 4) a process model describing the required steps to derive services from business processes. To succeed in a governmental context with diverse, federative organizational structures, the method needs a high degree of flexibility. In particular, the proposed method has been designed to be compatible with different process modeling techniques.