Master Thesis Duygu Akdemir

Nowadays, organizations have to cope with the changing business environment resulting from factors e.g. continuous advancement of technologies. In order to remain innovative and attractive for customers in this new environment, organizations are shifting from competition to cooperation. Companies increasingly cooperate with other companies including competitors from the same industry, organizations from different sectors, and other stakeholders. In doing so, the aim is often to gain benefits by creating synergy potential and exchanging knowledge. Organizations in cooperation are to a certain degree connected and related to each other, especially regarding their processes and IT. In this context, inter-organizational enterprise architecture occupy an important function. Usually, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) has the objective to support the alignment of business and IT of a single company. In terms of cooperation and interconnection among organizations, the significance and importance of inter-organizational enterprise architecture are increasing.
As little research has been conducted on collaboration across individual organizations in the field of EAM, the aim of this master's thesis is to fill this gap by providing a structured literature review on inter-organizational cooperation types and a multiple embedded case study on inter-organizational EAM in the media industry. The first part of this master's thesis presents an overview of 43 types of cooperation grouped into 14 categories and their characteristics. Based on these findings, a classification of the two case study partners using a morphological box is possible. Both partners of the case study are a type of working group. The second part of this master's thesis includes the case study. In particular, eleven public service media companies from a German working group and an international working group with representatives from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and England were analyzed. In total, 13 semi-structured interviews with employees performing the role of an enterprise architect were conducted. Each interview was split into four units of analysis, namely the reason for collaboration, the collaboration process including the challenges and benefits of the cooperation, the EAM including enterprise architecture artifacts, and the role of enterprise architects in the collaborative environment. The findings show, that both working groups are still at the initial phase of their cooperation. The collaboration across these organizations are formed by different causes such as cost-saving opportunities commissioned by top management or voluntary exchange of knowledge and experiences from individual employees. The findings reveal little to no change in the traditional role of an enterprise architect in the collaborative environment across organizations. However, the results indicate that cooperation between individual companies in the field of inter-organizational enterprise architecture is more likely if the companies are from the same industry and operate in the public sector.