Architectures – aiming at interoperability and good public services

Interoperability refers to authorities’ ability to exchange and transfer information effortlessly between different processes and systems. Interoperability is visible for citizens and companies as smooth service chains and cost-effective service provision. Interoperability is thus also authorities’ ability to work in cooperation to attain shared goals and to implement good governance.

However, interoperability does not just happen but it requires systematic and long-term planning. Architecture is in this work the key tool for development, planning and maintenance. Architecture makes visible the overview of the activity of public administration. 

Vision, strategy, challenges of the current state and the planning of finances and activities steer the development of public administration. Architecture helps to manage this entity and guide the selection of projects that implement change, for example. Architecture also guides and directs operating processes and solutions generated in individual projects, through which the target state of activities changes into the current state. Enterprise architecture (EA) is a planning method that describes how the operating processes, data and systems function as a whole. Architecture also refers to the description entity formed by activities, processes, services, data, information systems and the activities produced by them.

Enterprise architecture is one of the steering instruments for development, and thus part of the planning and decision-making structures of the organisation and more widely of public administration. Architectural decisions are part of decision-making related to development of activities.