Analyzing Task and Technology Characteristics for Enterprise Architecture Management Tool Support

Adequate tool support for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and its respective management function is crucial for the success of the discipline in practice. However, currently available tools used in organizations focus on structured information neglecting the collaborative effort required for developing and planning the EA. As a result, utilization of these tools by stakeholders is often not sufficient and availability of EA products in the organization is limited. We investigate the integration of existing EA tools and Enterprise Wikis to tackle these challenges. We will describe how EA initiatives can benefit from the use and integration of an Enterprise Wiki with an existing EA tool. Main goal of our research is to increase the utilization of EA tools and enhance the availability of EA products by incorporating unstructured information content in the tools. For this purpose we analyze task characteristics that we revealed from the processes and task descriptions of the EA department of a German insurance organization and align them with technology characteristics of EA tools and Enterprise Wikis. We empirically evaluated these technology characteristics using an online survey with results from 105 organizations in previous work. We apply the technology-to-performance chain model to derive the fit between task and technology characteristics for EA management (EAM) tool support in order to evaluate our hypotheses.