Enterprise architecture artefacts as instruments for knowledge management: a theoretical interpretation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Enterprise architecture (EA) involves a collection of special documents, or artefacts, describing various aspects of an organisation from an integrated business and IT perspective. Knowledge management is a practice of generating, storing and sharing knowledge within an organisation and EA artefacts can be clearly viewed as special instruments for managing knowledge. Based on the analysis of EA artefacts used in 27 diverse organisations, we study the properties of the most popular artefacts through the conceptual lenses of knowledge management. Specifically, we analyse what forms of knowledge these EA artefacts represent, what knowledge management strategies they implement, what knowledge management systems they leverage and how these features correlate with other properties of EA artefacts. This study provides arguably the first available in-depth analysis of EA artefacts as instruments for managing knowledge. Our analysis demonstrates a wide diversity of EA artefacts from the perspective of their approaches to knowledge management.