In the past, I have written extensively on the combination of enterprise architecture and agile development, most recently about the notion of intentional architecture. It is clear that for any organization or system of some size, a solid architecture practice is needed next to agile ways of working.
Welcome back to our ‘5 Questions CEOs Should Ask Themselves in 2020’ series. Read more
As we embark on this new journey that is the 2020’s, CEOs ought to acknowledge the crossroads that’s ahead of them, and the choice they need to make. Read more
Excessive complexity is something that most organizations over a certain size have to deal with. The more successful you are, the bigger the enterprise gets, and the farther removed it gradually becomes from the original core tenets that probably made it successful in the first place. So how does this hurt a company? Well, if we’re talking about the IT estate, erratic expansion and the resulting unmanaged complexity makes its presence felt in the form of higher IT management costs, increased risk, and a slow rate of innovation.
Organizations today are faced with an ever-increasing speed of change. To enable faster transformation, they implement agile methods, which impact the whole enterprise. Obviously, change need to be communicated, but one cannot document all the details because otherwise they would be outdated the next week, or perhaps the very next day. Read more
In my previous blog post on using the ArchiMate modeling language together with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), I briefly mentioned the need for modeling the intent of the enterprise. In an agile context, this notion of intent and intentional architecture is quite important. In this blog, I want to explore that further.
An enterprise architect friend of mine recently posed an interesting question: “I lead a relatively mature EA practice that delivers good value to our organization. We are digitally transforming the organization and adopting agile ways of working across the enterprise, which is improving our outcomes for individual initiatives. But I am worried these efforts are sometimes wasted on delivering capabilities managers tell us are important, rather than the ones that are truly game-changing. How do I get in front of this, and help lead us to the right strategic outcomes?”
In previous blogs, we have written about the combination of structure and data to create novel insights into your enterprise, and about how this can support creating a Digital Twin of your organization. To reiterate, a digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system.
It seems like an unlikely pair, doesn’t it – Agile and Enterprise Architecture? Yet, as Agile awakens to the reality of having to move fast but in concert with other parts of the organization, and EA itself becomes more engaging and business goals-oriented, it actually makes a lot of sense to want to combine the two. Both practices bring significant benefits to an organization. Together they promise to unlock efficiencies that would increase business performance to a whole new level. Who could say no to a mix of organizational agility and solid strategic decision making? That would boost any business or digital initiative.