The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published in October 2004 ”Architecture for Digital Administration – Handbook on Concepts, Frameworks and Processes”, also just known as ”The Handbook”. The document described how the public administration faces new challenges and demands that can only be met through a systematic planning of the use of it. The planning must compare the needs of the business with what the systems and technologies in use currently offer, consider the opportunities that new technologies offer, and based on this define the future system landscape and a plan for realizing this. A plan for this is called an enterprise architecture, abbreviated EA.
”The Handbook” drafted an approach to develop such an enterprise architecture. It described which considerations to make in the individual steps, and gave examples on which methods to use. The overall framework method was the one depicted below.
The work on the OIO enterprise erchitecture method sought to make this rather general framework more operational. Each of the activities has been broken down to 2-6 steps, and each step has been described systematically. For each step has been described:
- Purpose – why do the step, how does it help to realize an enterprise architecture?
- Actors – who will typically participate in the step?
- Input – what is the foundation for the step (under this: which output from which previously conducted steps will be used?)
- Output – what will be the deliverables from the step?
- Method (in survey) – how will the step typically be approached?
- Good advices – ”best practice” experiences that adds to the brief description of the method.
- Examples – for many steps an example illustrates how the output could be.
- References to relevant documents and templates, links to documents that may give inspiration and more insight in how to conduct the individual step. There are also references to similar steps in other methods and to other frameworks (however, there may not be an exact 1:1 correspondence between OIO EA steps and those in other methods/frameworks).
OIO EA comes in a static and a dynamic version. The static comprises a number of documents, including an Introduction to OIO EA, a description of the individual steps, a collection of scenarios, and a description of the OIO EA framework. These documents can be downloaded and printed. The dynamic version is an interactive handbook with links to other resources within and outside the OIO EA portal. The OIO EA portal is ongoing being expanded with new, relevant content.
OIO EA can be used for various purposes, including:
- Implementation of an it project.
- The conduct of an it Request-for-Proposal.
- Consolidation of workflows in relation to a harmonisation effort.
- Consolidation of the information architecture at an enterprise level.
- Development of a partial enterprise architecture, for instance infrastructure consolidation.
- Development of a full enterprise architecture for a public authority.
- Development of an architecture for data infrastructure in a domain, in cross-domains or common public.
- Development of an architecture for a common public infrastructure.
OIO EA incorporates more detailed OIO standards and guides, for instance the OIO catalogue of technology standards, OIOXML data standards (the “InfraStructureBase”), OIO web services, etc.