Collaborative Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture

EA or Enterprise Architecture is a discipline that holistically and proactively lead responses of an enterprise to various disruptive forces through identification and analysis of required changes in execution and desired business values.  Business values are delivered by EA through business process and IT based recommendations on adjustments of projects and policies for achieving the business targets that can be capitalized in relation to relevant business disruptions. Hence, EA is used for business decision making in order to evaluate future status of the enterprise architecture. (Ross, Weill, & Robertson, 2013)

Benefits from enterprise architecture can be described as “better, faster and cheaper” or BFC. But these benefits are based on some investment on enterprise architecture of an organization, its cultural and organizational structure.

Agile modeling for EA helps in maximizing the return on investment of the stakeholders. It also strives for maximal benefits. (Bloomberg, 2013)

Agile Enterprise Architectural Model

Agile enterprise architecture model is service oriented model. It helps the people of an organization in realizing their jobs for helping project teams towards success. Corporate vision is evolved and defined by the senior stakeholders of an organization. The focus on this EA model is more on the people of the organization rather that the technology part.

In case of the agile model, it needs to introduce the techniques of agile architecture into an organization slowly and grow the strategy with time. It helps in achieving steady success and learning process. However, agile enterprise architecture help a business to have agility and achieving this agility by using different information technology tools and services. Information technology tools and services help in building the agile enterprise architecture to build up quickly and efficiently. (Cretu, 2014)

Agile enterprise architecture is based on the concept of “just in time”. Under this model of EA, user stories are developed only when those are needed, not before or after. Those are released when it is possible to have its appropriate value. Each iteration of project development has some definite value to meet by the EA team.

It offers “just enough” EA through the followings,

Offers marketing style campaigns that focuses on the EA initiatives. It describes and gathers all requires information for satisfying the goal of such campaign.

Project teams develop an EA model that will be valid for the entire project.

Collaboration is a key in agile EA.

In each iteration planning is done for the iteration only for achieving the goal of that particular iteration.

“Just enough” does not conflicts with consistency of the EA model. One of the great advantage. The BFC benefits of Agile EA are, (Bente, Bombosch, & Langade, 2012)

It helps agile teams in delivering better quality solutions for the stakeholders through offering a eco system that is more reliable.

It helps agile terms in delivering solutions faster to the market. This is possible by utilizing the concepts of reusability and improvement of the quality of underlying infrastructure.

It helps agile teams in delivering low cost but high quality solution. This is possible due to consistent platform, better quality and reusability.

On the downside, agile EA is not still widely accepted and not adapted by many enterprises.

References:

Bente, S., Bombosch, U., & Langade, S. (2012). Collaborative Enterprise Architecture. Newnes.

Bloomberg, J. (2013). The Agile Architecture Revolution. John Wiley & Sons.

Cretu, L. G. (2014). Designing Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. CRC Press.

Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. (2013). Enterprise Architecture As Strategy. Harvard Business Press.