Agile enterprise architecture

Seize the opportunity of agile

Architecting for Cost, Quality, and Speed in an Agile World.

To meet the accelerated pace of business leaders’ needs, one of the many changes cascading through IT organizations is the expanding use of Agile development. As the use of Agile expands, organizations experience coordination challenges within IT that undermine the potential benefits of Agile. 

We have identified six practices EA leaders can use to support a successful transition to Agile at scale in their organizations. These practices reflect how progressive EA leaders in organizations of all sizes and industries change EA’s approach to governance, engagement, and planning to support Agile at scale while balancing speed to market with cost efficiency, risk reduction, and design quality. 

Agile Approach
  1. Prepare distributed Agile teams to adopt architecture thinking, modelling, and communication
  2. Offer just-in-time architecture design assurance
  3. Use agile techniques with agile teams to deliver guidance on enterprise standards and priorities
  4. Default to lower levels of EA oversight and engagement for all projects— except the most risky or important ones
  5. Deliver reference implementations for developers that lead them to do the right thing by default
  6. Define flexible, less detailed strategies, plans, and budgets, and execute them using iterative approaches.

Traditional Approach
  1. Train centralized architects to be adept at architecture thinking, modelling, and communication
  2. Mandate calendar-based, stage-gated architecture design approval
  3. Use a common approach with waterfall and agile teams to deliver guidance on enterprise standards and priorities
  4. Default to significant EA oversight and engagement for the majority of projects
  5. Deliver document-based reference architectures for developers that describe what they should do
  6. Confirm detailed strategies, plans, and budgets before executing them completely.

In our recent 2020 Gartner EA Summit survey, more than 1000 EA leaders ranked Agile EA as one of their top 5 priorities for 2020. Is it a priority for you, as well? 

Want to gain more insights like these? Join us at Gartner Enterprise Architecture & Technolgy Innovation Summit, 10-11 June 2020, in London.