Avoiding Redundancy in the Management of Technical Documentation and Models: Requirements Analysis and Prototypical Implementation for Enterprise Architecture Management

Abstract

To make well-founded decisions, managers require consistent access to adequate and expedient information. Enterprise Architecture Management approaches this challenge by aligning information technology and business. However, as enterprises grow and evolve, frequently the problem arises, that information is utilized in various artifacts (e.g. documentations and reports), causing inconsistencies in content and form. Thus their content partially overlap and redundancies occur. This factor, combined with extensive information volume, rapidly changing requirements, and manually processing leads to 3 major problems in the documentation of the Enterprise Architecture. It is considered as time consuming, cost extensive, and error prone.

Addressing these problems, companies demand an applicable report-generating tool to prevent these redundancies, whereby consistent artifacts have to be created. Accordingly, specific requirements arise.
In this thesis practical relevant requirements for such a reporting tool are elaborated. Hereupon a concept is devised to accomplish and prototypically implement those requirements. As technical environment SocioCortex is in use. SocioCortex is an information system to organize semi-structured data within Enterprise Architecture Management, employing a dynamic and collaborative Wiki-based approach. Thus data is structured and presented as interconnected Wiki-pages. Additionally attributes and tasks may be denoted to incrementally enhance the data’s structure. By applying this system as data-provider for a report-generator the confinement of properly collected data can be attenuated.

Via implementing this prototype the potentialities and capabilities of a reporting function within SocioCortex shall be demonstrated. A final review evaluates the implementation and its integration within the system. Moreover additional requirements, for the deployment in real enterprises, are discussed