Using a Visual Wiki for IT Knowledge Management

Abstract

The catch cry of John Zachman when talking about Enterprise Architecture is ‘Document, document, document, document.... {for as many times as possible until a deep breath and then) Document, document, document, document and document again’.

This rallying cry fills a tertiary sector Enterprise Architect with foreboding daunted by the sheer amount of organisational information needed to constitute even a partially populated six by six dimension Zachman Framework.

Forming and sustaining Enterprise Architecture (EA) is possible if authoring is distributed across an organisation. However existing EA diagramming and repository tools are aimed at EA practitioners and are not user or cost friendly for the general user populace.

Treating EA as a form of IT Knowledge Management and using the Confluence Wiki has improved the capture of IT information within The University of Auckland. However as the volume of information has mounted, the ability to navigate and sustain the knowledgebase has decreased, and the demand for ‘simple diagrams showing everything’ was not satisfied by Gliffy plugins.

Working closely with the Computer Science department of The University of Auckland, we have prototyped alternate ways of capturing IT information that allows visual navigation combined with the agility of Wiki’s aka ’The Visual Wiki’.