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

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 requiredcompetitive advantage through better decision making and improved outcomes measuresmay be facilitated by an agile, IT aligned Enterprise Architecture, which is rapidlybecoming a basic ideology of IT. This research project presents the findings of aninvestigation conducted to assess maturity levels of Enterprise Architecture and theassociated challenges to its evolution in the South African private healthcare serviceindustry. In fully exploring this, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are used toaddress the respective research questions. A quantitative approach in the form of asurvey and Enterprise Architecture maturity assessment served to determine the ITdemographics and Enterprise Architecture maturity levels respectively. A qualitativeapproach, facilitated by in-depth interviews, served to identify the emergent themeshighlighting the challenges facing the implementation and evolution of EnterpriseArchitecture. The collected data was analysed by thematic analysis Key findings for this research conclude that IT is of vital importance to sustaining day-todayoperations and long term strategic objectives of these organisations; EnterpriseArchitecture maturity is low, assessed as being under-development, which is related toelements of the Enterprise Architecture being omitted, due to their associated costs andperceived poor return on investment. The prevalent challenges to the implementation andevolution of Enterprise Architecture, is summarised as being; the need for skilledresources and resource time; the need system standardisation; the need for a positivereturn on investment; the need for a business understanding of Enterprise Architecture;removal of existing legacy systems; and the industry related legislation. Copyright © 2007, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria Please cite as follows: Adao, V 2007, Factors affecting the energy consumption of data centres in South Africa, MBA dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-03182010-155206/ > G10/115/ag