GovDept is a mid-size governmental department providing important services of a social nature to the
population of a large territory. From the technology perspective, the organization can be considered
as a late adopter of innovations and characterized by relative underinvestment in IT, which has certain
implications for both its IT landscape and respective management practices. On the one hand,
GovDept’s IT landscape is very heterogeneous and includes many legacy information systems and
technologies some of which have been in use for decades. On the other hand, its IT-related
Page | 3
Asia Pacific International College Pty Ltd. Trading as Asia Pacific International College
55 Regent Street, Chippendale, Sydney 2008: 02-9318 8111
PRV12007; CRICOS 03048D
Approved: 14/02/2019, Version 1
management practices are also rather archaic. For instance, the relationships between business and
IT leaders in the organization exhibit evident signs of “us and them” mentality, while new investments
in IT are viewed by business mostly as a means to reduce costs of the existing operations.
GovDept has a centralized IT department headed by the CIO and responsible for developing and
supporting information systems for all its business units. The IT department employs around 250
specialists and consists of three main functions: architecture, development and service. The
architecture function includes a few architects focused predominantly on specific IT solutions.
GovDept previously tried to uplift the maturity of its EA practice and extend the scope of architectural
planning beyond separate initiatives, but these attempts did not succeed and respective architects
had been made redundant.