Tailoring a Domain-Specific Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model

Abstract

Healthcare organisations lag behind on utilising information technology. Enterprise architecture can provide these increasingly complex organisations with appropriate data structures, information systems, and infrastructure to ensure agility, consistency, compliance, and efficiency. The effectiveness of the enterprise architecture is often expressed as the level of maturity. Several models have been introduced to measure and improve the enterprise architecture maturity of organisations. However, there is none yet for hospitals. There also lies an opportunity to enrich enterprise architecture maturity models with reference architectures. Therefore, this research comprises the design of an enterprise architecture maturity model for hospitals with the help of a reference architecture. We conducted a systematic literature review to establish the state-of-the-art of enterprise architecture maturity models. From these existing models, we selected one to tailor it towards hospitals with the help of a reference architecture. We successfully integrated parts of the reference architecture in the existing model by metamodeling both models and finding components which have overlap in the dimension of enterprise architecture they focus on. This first initial design was subject for the first validation. With two focus group sessions we validated the design and improved the design, the first concerned the semantics of the design whereas the second comprised the syntax of the design. After these two focus group sessions, some parts were still unclear and needed further improvement and validation. Therefore, we organised an expert interview and think aloud sessions. With this extra validation we concluded the design of the model. By conducting a multiple-case study research we then validated the model itself in the context of Dutch hospitals. In total, we conducted case studies at seven hospitals. The results show that the architects of the hospitals have positive attitudes towards the intention to use, perceived usefulness, and the perceived ease of use of the enterprise architecture maturity model for hospitals. Additional interviews strengthen these results and provided more insight into their perceptions. These interviews also revealed some weaknesses of the working method, leaving room for future improvements.