The Entanglement of Enterprise Architecture and IT-Governance: The Cases of Norway and the Netherlands

Governments are developing infrastructures to spur e-government development. These e-government infrastructures are based on the notion of ICT as a utility that can be (re-)used by organizations at all levels of government to create their own service provisioning and to facilitate interaction with each other. This paper investigates the development of such infrastructures by looking at regional and national aspects. A cross-country comparative framework is developed and 2 countries are analyzed. We found that infrastructure development in both countries is similar at a global level, yet the governance is different. While Norway aims to enable integration by developing a Business Process Management building block on the national level, in the Netherlands local governments compose and integrate the building blocks with implementation support from the national level. These differences between e- government infrastructure developments of the two countries can be attributed to the degree of centralization of government and the degree of active support given to e-government developments.