Case Study: Taipei City Government Enterprise Architecture

In 2021, the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) of the Taipei City Government embarked on their adoption of Enterprise Architecture to support the Taipei Smart City plan. The Taipei City Government had developed an action plan for Digital Transformation to realize the Taipei Smart City, which included eight items for digital infrastructure, nine items for digital talent cultivation, 12 items for zero-contact services, and other items for industry transformation and housing development. In addition to the continuous innovation of civic services, the Taipei City Government has adopted a strategy of “from the inside out, from the public to the private”, supported through the creation of digital infrastructure. Taipei will promote Digital Transformation and cooperate with private enterprises and departments to create innovative services that meet the needs of citizens and improve the effectiveness of municipal services.

The Taipei City Government was the first government/organization to introduce Enterprise Architecture in Taiwan. The pilot research undertaken prior to this introduction was a holistic check of Taipei City’s e-readiness and Enterprise Architecture maturity and, simultaneously, the most widespread promotion of Enterprise Architecture education and training and Enterprise Architecture concept to its agencies; the valuable results obtained will tremendously assist the future promotion and evolution of Enterprise Architecture in Taipei.

The Taipei City Government’s drive for Digital Transformation was supported by their urge to turn around situations which developed during the pandemic. The pandemic created new demands for contactless digital channels including:

The Taipei City Government’s response and mission was “No crisis should go to waste”. The government realized they did not know the market better than the industry itself, and that what they could do was to build a digital services platform. The adoption of Enterprise Architecture was positioned to help agencies to eliminate waste and duplication, increase shared services, close performance gaps, and promote engagement among government, industry, and citizens to deliver effective digital services.

The Taipei City Government has a huge organization structure, composed of more than 100 departments and divisions each with their own information management office. The current information services were developed based on the visions and goals of these individual information management offices, making it difficult to integrate various information services and upgrade them into the truly digital services needed for Taipei Smart City without some common Enterprise Architecture.

The development of the Enterprise Architecture practice involved the numerous stakeholders in the digital ecosystem including the mayor, senior government officials, business owners, existing system owners, commercial vendors building and/or maintaining software solutions, recruiting companies providing resources to the city, and citizens.

The Taipei City Government have developed their Government Enterprise Architecture Framework (GEAF) by innovatively combining the TOGAF^® Standard [C220] and the U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF).^[1] They have initiated an Enterprise Architecture practice to unify application strategy, budget review, performance indicators, and other aspects of the Digital Transformation of the whole province, providing a comprehensive vision to improve IT governance which can serve as a global model for smart cities.

Given the broad nature of the change, a centralized team was developed to initiate the architecture practice, which focused on:

The reasoning behind developing their own Enterprise Architecture framework was to develop a Minimal Viable Enterprise Architecture [Sadler 2019], a key subset of the TOGAF Standard, providing the opportunity to implement it quickly throughout the entire organization.

The core Enterprise Architecture team members were recruited based on their knowledge, skill, and attitude and were encouraged to obtain Enterprise Architecture certifications.

The motivation architecture of this Enterprise Architecture project began with the concerns of key stakeholders, which were investigated by a questionnaire survey and field interviews in 2018. Taipei City Government DoIT defined issues and explored solutions to form the architecture requirements needed for success. The following activities were considered as part of the preparations:

Throughout this Enterprise Architecture project, Taipei City kept the architecture requirements in the context of the architecture visions and goals of the initiatives proposed for Taipei Smart City; limiting the completion and reviews of artifacts to the motivation architecture.

In 2018, the Enterprise Architecture group was established to take stock of the processes and systems of information governance, and to introduce the concept of Enterprise Architecture into a new framework for reshaping IT governance. The simultaneous implementation of the functional planning, education and training of leaders, the addition of planning and operating check points, the introduction of tools and methodologies, and the improvement of various processes enabled the municipal government to officially launch 2022 as the “First Year of Architecture” in promoting Digital Transformation, which was the starting point and the beginning of transition toward Enterprise Architecture.

As shown in Figure 1, the initial Enterprise Architecture implementation is referred to as the Taipei GEAF Mini Set, which includes six types of architecture views and three types of matrix tables including:

Figure 1 : Taipei GEAF Mini Set Nine Square Grid Frame Diagram

The ArchiMate core diagram is the anchor and context for the other GEAF views and matrices. It defines and relates all aspects of the architecture:

Taipei City had informal catalogs of these entities prior to the adoption of the Enterprise Architecture framework. As a matter of fact, the core 20 applications on the system list were prioritized to be the first to adopt the Enterprise Architecture framework. The GEAF both validates these inventories/catalogs and makes them, and the relationships between them, visible across the organization. Prior to implementing the framework, the detailed catalogs and the relationships/dependencies were well known by the people building the systems, but others maintaining the systems may not have the same level of knowledge. The GEAF facilitates the documenting and sharing of system, process, information, and technology-comprising solutions in a consistent approach.

Figure 2: Taipei GEAF Mini Set for Citizen Service Platform

Figure 3: ArchiMate Core Framework Diagram

Surrounding this Enterprise Architecture framework was a larger group of tool sets organizing to align architecture with business vision and strategy and required business capabilities including project management, system development, and platform engineering. Catalogs of the processes, organization, technology/systems, and information are maintained in the Architecture Repository and/or system repository.

Figure 4: Taipei GEAF and Toolsets [Source: Taipei Smart City Project]

In June of 2022, the Taipei GEAF website^[2] was launched to promote the Enterprise Architecture initiative, describe the GEAF Mini Set, and to launch some education on Enterprise Architecture and the process via online videos.^[3]

The plan was to document the existing 42 legacy systems to develop the architecture base. The same Enterprise Architecture framework will be used to develop the proposed Smart City initiatives, extending the core framework with various kinds of Enterprise Architecture representations, such as texts, schematic diagrams, voices, images, dynamics, tables, matrices, and so forth, leveraging the TOGAF ADM.

The core team architects were paired up with the business unit implementing a digital initiative work package, providing the required Enterprise Architecture knowledge, and supporting the business owner.

The Taipei City Government can link with central agencies following Taipei GEA, which will facilitate smooth administrative operations between central and local governments.

Enterprise Architecture was positioned to govern and coordinate the projects that would implement/evolve application systems and technology platforms. Ultimately, by using both a top-down planning and bottom-up implementation approach following the Enterprise Architecture, the Taipei City Government hopes to initiate a blueprint-driven Digital Transformation of the city and its services.

Figure 5: Blueprint-Driven Digital Transformation

An initial risk was that few or no architecture practices were in place in the IT department, which was mitigated by:

The ongoing risk of sporadic adoption was mitigated through developing templates for every Enterprise Architecture artifact to include:

Figure 6: Collect Data – Foreign Cases / Questionnaire / Field Interview

Governance is provided by a centralized review process, which allows touchpoints for education and the evolution of Enterprise Architecture practice. The Taipei City Government intends to use Agile methodologies so that the Enterprise Architecture artifacts will be reviewed frequently with each project team, located in different areas, using a combination of online or face-to-face meetings.

The re-use of artifacts and integration between projects/activities is facilitated by storing artifacts in a common repository.

Based on the Taipei City Government’s experiences of introducing Enterprise Architecture, this Enterprise Architecture framework and principles can be adapted for other counties and cities. Laws or policies relating to GEA can be gradually formulated, issued, and executed to support the introduction of Enterprise Architecture practices in central and local governments, so the effects of cross-agency integration can be achieved in the future. Enterprise Architecture methodologies can match business flow with information flow to raise the percentage of automatic business processes. After conducting the integration of enterprise lifecycle management based on Enterprise Architecture, and reviewing business items, core businesses can be greatly reduced, and labor costs can be further decreased.

The Taipei GEAF Mini Set has allowed them to guide service delivery by providing sufficient motivation architecture to initiate Digital Transformation projects aligned with the strategic goals of Taipei Smart City. The detailed architecture provides guidance for implementation, optimizes resource utilization by eliminating waste and duplication, and helps to keep projects focused on their specific outcomes, and, thus, on track and on budget. The Architecture Repository provides the authoritative reference whereby subsequent projects can leverage previous work.

The Taipei City Government added the UML^® sequence diagram (see Figure 7) into the mix, as they found that the application communication diagrams described the static structures between components, but not the dynamic nature of application events and processes required by software engineers and development teams to describe and implement modern solutions.

Figure 7: UML Sequence Diagram Showing Dynamic Interactions

60 implementation strategies for digital services have been produced using the motivation architecture principles. The digital service cases derived from the action plan include:

15 of the 42 digital service systems managed by the IT department have been inventoried using the GEAF Mini Set and the rest will be completed by the end of the year.

The IT department has investigated 30 important business events and organized the related business processes by means of BPMN. By December 2022, all business events and related processes were reviewed.

The Taipei City Government has investigated 1,400 business events of citizen services and organized the related business processes using BPMN. By December 2022, over 120 reviews of business events were conducted from the Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) for reference models that will help the agencies responsible to finish organizing all the work by the end of this year.

The core Enterprise Architecture team believes the Taipei GEA will thrive gradually under their leadership because its promotion and implementation has strongly attracted the attention of many officials. While there has been no formal assessment done yet to assess the Enterprise Architecture maturity or to evaluate the progress made with metrics, Taipei City believes that they have moved from the Managed level to the Defined level on the Capability Maturity Model Integration scale,^[4] as the GEAF has become the standard process and projects are now tailoring their work and deliverables to comply with the framework instead of developing and following their own framework/processes.

According to the Taipei City Government and the Enterprise Architecture framework, developing an e-RAM survey for government e-readiness and government e-maturity will include conducting in-depth interviews and field surveys as qualitative methods to verify and confirm the statistics and analysis of the e-RAM survey.

Figure 8: e-RAM (Agency e-Readiness and Maturity Survey)

These surveys and the Taipei GEAF can evolve to support a wider digital ecosystem for Taipei City including:

This ecosystem will support a more livable and sustainable smart Taipei City.

Figure 9: Smart Taipei Ecosystem Framework