A competency framework to support the development of service-ecosystem emergent-aware government architecture and capability.

The advancement of public governance, digital capabilities, social impact, and socio-technical evolutions has shifted the focus of government agencies from enterprise to ecosystem contexts. A dependency in this shift is the development of competencies to progress the capability to support the democratisation and sustainability of social, economic, and environmental initiatives. The research objective was to construct a framework for the development of government agency competencies to provision service-ecosystem architecture capabilities to enable evolutionary opportunities in governance. Through a ‘service-dominant logic’ perspective we address the complexities of progressing social and economic initiatives. Taking a design science research approach, leaders from the Australian government sector were interviewed to develop and refine the initial domain model and compose baseline competencies. The framework identifies three competencies: architectural cohesion, emergence-aware orientation, and institutional agility. The framework provides guidance for government agencies and sets the stage for further exploration of government service-ecosystems and supporting configurations.