  Public sector procurement units in the field of ICT suffer from siloed,
application-specific architectures, where each system operates in isolation
from others. As a consequence, similar or even identical data is maintained in
several different databases hosted by different organizations. Such problems
are caused by the lack of standard guidelines and practices that would result
in interoperable systems instead of overlapping ones. In the Finnish public
sector, enterprise architecture (EA) is a mandatory requirement so that an
ecosystem can be formed to overcome the above problems. However, the adoption
rates are low, and the focus is often on technology rather than processes and
practices. This study investigates the use of EA and its potential in Finnish
procurement units through semi-structured interviews. Five procurement units
and four vendors participated in the study, and altogether 12 interviews took
place.
