How do you manage an extended enterprise architecture (EA) team with a federated structure?

Question

Answer

Within our structure, my boss is the chief architect and he's the sole decision maker if we have any arbitration. He oversees all of architecture and I oversee all the capabilities needed to fulfill business requirements. We have architects in each business unit (BU), but part of how we work together is by coordinating our capability map with the framework. Our headcount is about 17K, but I own the framework and tooling so that there is a process for how everybody works across.

There are still silos but because we see Intuit as one platform, like an integrated ERP for small businesses, so things have to come together. The company gets structured around how the capabilities are grouped within the capability taxonomy. We’re working on rationalizing those capabilities and structuring the teams accordingly to deliver. It requires us to bring all these silos together because they have to inter-operate in order for all the end-to-end integrated ERP on the platform to work. So even though silos exist, the vision is to come together to deliver an AI-driven expert platform.

Answer

The teams that can successful align their services to ownership models with well defined interfaces that can be architected to able to be rebuilt/decoupled from dependencies and within 1-2 sprints have traditionally produced higher quality code and tend to ship.

Answer

My firm has a highly federated architecture operating model. My centralized Enterprise Architecture team works very closely with the federated architects (&#34;feds&#34;) that are embedded in business-aligned IT teams across the organization. We have evolved our culture to have a strong working relationship between my team and the feds, so our team is brought in when localized projects require the enterprise perspective or support. We also host a monthly session with all of them to share practices, emerging technologies, and other topics of interest and this is heavily attended. We have spent a lot of time building up this community, and have some plans for this year to further it by having internal certifications for all architects, and potentially contributing to the federated architects annual performance reviews with an enterprise goal and objective that we provide direct feedback on.

How do you manage an extended enterprise architecture (EA) team with a federated structure?

Content you might like

In your opinion, what’s the most important responsibility of a Scrum Master?

If you had a magic wand - what's the #1 daily business challenge you'd eliminate?

Are you using container-based architectures?

Can anyone share effective strategies they've used to help individual contributors recognize the intrinsic value and personal significance in their tasks, especially when the company's mission or the nature of their projects might not be considered the most captivating?

Biggest Agile pet peeve?