The maturity of enterprise architecture and challenges to its evolution in the South African private healthcare service industry

Abstract

South Africa has a well defined, highly complex private healthcare services industry with a high reliance on the use of intricate IT systems to ensure its sustainability. The required competitive advantage through better decision making and improved outcomes measures may be facilitated by an agile, IT aligned Enterprise Architecture, which is rapidly becoming a basic ideology of IT. This research project presents the findings of an investigation conducted to assess maturity levels of Enterprise Architecture and the associated challenges to its evolution in the South African private healthcare service industry. In fully exploring this, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are used to address the respective research questions. A quantitative approach in the form of a survey and Enterprise Architecture maturity assessment served to determine the IT demographics and Enterprise Architecture maturity levels respectively. A qualitative approach, facilitated by in-depth interviews, served to identify the emergent themes highlighting the challenges facing the implementation and evolution of Enterprise Architecture. The collected data was analysed by thematic analysis Key findings for this research conclude that IT is of vital importance to sustaining day-today operations and long term strategic objectives of these organisations; Enterprise Architecture maturity is low, assessed as being ‘under-development”, which is related to elements of the Enterprise Architecture being omitted, due to their associated costs and perceived poor return on investment. The prevalent challenges to the implementation and evolution of Enterprise Architecture, is summarised as being; the need for skilled resources and resource time; the need system standardisation; the need for a positive return on investment; the need for a business understanding of Enterprise Architecture; removal of existing legacy systems; and the industry related legislation.