Master Thesis Gloria Bondel

Over the last years, Information Technology (IT) turned into a critical success factor for businesses in many branches. In the course of this development, the amount of applications supporting the daily business of enterprises grew rapidly, resulting in complex application landscapes. A high complexity of IT landscapes reduces the flexibility of enterprises to adapt to the fast changing environments they are operating in. A means to cope with this complexity and therefore to enable the easy transformation of organizations is Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM).

Even though there is a generic understanding of what the field of EAM comprises, there is also a lack of consensus with regards to theoretical foundations and stringent definitions of foundational terms. This vagueness makes it difficult for prospects to find access to the topic and for experts to communicate its value. To solve this issue, the online community eam-initiative.org is created, which aims at fostering consensus within the EAM community and thereby to advance the topic of EAM. The distinctive feature of this online community is the use of a wiki-approach, which guides the structure of the website. Wikis have proven to be a successful tool for collaboratively collecting and consolidating knowledge. However, in the beginning a wiki has to generate sufficient utility in order to find value for users in their participation.

The goal of this thesis is to provide the initial utility for the eam-initiative.org by developing and implementing the structure of the website as well as enriching it with an initial set of foundational wiki articles on EAM. Additionally, a concept map is introduced as a tool for navigating through the wiki content. The resulting website including the wiki articles and the concept map is evaluated using an online survey. Finally, after the initial utility is provided, an action plan for future community building is presented.