Within the public sector, the deployment of enterprise architecture is often an attempt to address the decentralization/centralization relationships to improve the links between the central and the local governments. The underlying aim is to provide a better structure to manage the diverse, independent and local IT-related projects and development activities.

In this paper we propose a novel approach to analyzing and understanding the requirements and limitations for enterprise architectures in government. We use the perspective of a complex adaptive system as a metaphor to examine 11 e-government projects with each involved the development of enterprise architecture in the Netherlands (1980s - 2004). Through analyzing the key interaction points between the central and the local governments, we identify architectural design principles that will increase inter-organizational jointness and IT implementation success.