Digitalization has been shaping our society already for decades. However, despite the rapid development of new technologies, the change from paper-based systems and processes in the public sector has been slow and somewhat painful. These challenges often relate to the difficulties in institutional restructuring, process redesign and inter-organizational collaboration. Enterprise architecture, on the other hand, aims to support the issues of alignment and integration, between the information systems and business processes. In this thesis digitalization and enterprise architecture are studied in public sector context. Also, the conceptual dimensions of both digitalization and enterprise architecture are investigated based on existing literature. It appeared that the adoption of digital opportunities in a public sector organization can be either reinforcing or transformational. The latter one, however, requires major effort throughout the organization to support horizontal integration in order to enable a customer-oriented organization. Also, it was found out that enterprise architecture, rather than a single concept, constitutes a number of dimensions that steer its value-creation logic as well as adoption in an organization. Most importantly, enterprise architecture can be characterized as the realized organizing logic of the ICT and processes or as a meta process consisting of methods and artefacts that support decision making in order to build a such realized organizing logic.This study concludes that in order to adopt digital transformation in the case organization, enterprise architecture should a) be exploited to create a common architectural vision of the enterprise and b) provide understanding of the current organization to move towards the vision. Also, enterprise architecture should support the sense-making of the novel technological developments and the adoption of them in the case organization. Finally, enterprise architecture should act both as a structure and a guiding vision for implementing the digital opportunities.
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