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The role of enterprise architects must be expanded in order to keep pace with the developments that are occurring in business and industry. Although stability and sustainability remain important, new requirements are arising – one of which is speed. Only if enterprise architecture can meet these requirements will it become an enabler of further development, rather than an obstacle to it.

The role of enterprise architects must be expanded in order to keep pace with the developments that are occurring in business and industry. Although stability and sustainability remain important, new requirements are arising – one of which is speed. Only if enterprise architecture can meet these requirements will it become an enabler of further development, rather than an obstacle to it.

• The platforms that IT architecture creates can only remain stable temporarily, which is why IT architecture needs to become faster and utilize agile methods.
• Enterprise architects need to interact with customers and quickly process the information they receive through customer feedback.
• The architectural thinking approach needs to establish a collective understanding of “excellent products and services” and promote an architecture that can achieve this goal.
• A fine tuned enterprise architecture management (EAM) system supports transformation processes and associated projects by making available reusable architecture elements and secure reference architectures.

The Cross-Business-Architecture Lab (CBA Lab) examined the future of enterprise architecture management in its “Applied Agile EAM” working group. The working group results were recently published in a white paper that answers the question as to how an enterprise architecture organization can structure itself and its activities in a manner that can help shape the rapid digital transformation under way in business and industry.

The traditional role of an architect is to ensure that structures, stability, and standards and methods are maintained and, in the case of the latter, complied with as well. This role must now be expanded, however, in order to better address the transformation of companies into organizations that display more initiative and are more dynamic, creative, and innovative than has been the case up until now.

IT architecture needs to become more agile

This new expanded job description is based on the firm conviction that in a world marked by rapid change, insecurity, increasing complexity, and uncertainty, architecture can only temporarily create understanding and clarity (i.e. as various phases progress). This conviction then forms the basis for the development of agile processes that ensure companies remain capable of effective action in a volatile world. However, because the platforms that enterprise architecture creates can only remain stable temporarily, architecture itself needs to become faster and more agile and make use of the agile methods that are employed in IT development departments, for example.

Enterprise architects need to get out and interact with customers

The more agile methods are used at companies, the larger the discrepancy will become between traditional enterprise architecture management (EAM) and the role enterprise architects need to play in today’s business world. In other words, a conflict is arising with regard to what needs to be retained and what needs to change. For example, traditional EAM addresses the future of the IT landscape – i.e. it seeks to create and implement a target architecture. However, such a future-focused approach is not flexible enough to address current problems.

Agile EAM, on the other hand, is geared toward the solution of specific problems and can react flexibly to changed conditions. “Enterprise architects will simply become members of teams,” says CBA Lab Workstream Coordinator Marc Gorges, who also serves as Senior Enterprise Architect Mobility Solutions at Bosch. “They will need to work in the field, have frequent contact with customers, and quickly analyze the input they receive from periodic feedback rounds.” Enterprise architecture will not be a show-stopper, so to speak, but will instead become an active team component that brings opportunities to life, helps improve services and products, and thus ultimately leads to higher earnings at a company.

Gorges’ colleague at Bosch, Bernhard Lerch, adds the following: “Companies are currently being transformed extremely rapidly, whereby enterprise architecture is actively helping to shape this transformation. As it does so, EAM is also significantly expanding its goals and its use of agile methods.” 

Three requirements for the new approach to architecture management

A new value system and a new understanding of the role that architecture management needs to play are leading to changes in the goals pursued by enterprise architects in the digital and agile environment.

If an enterprise architecture management system is to achieve these new goals, it must meet three requirements:

• It must be focused and geared toward effectiveness and value creation. It must also be solution-oriented, view enabling and the definition of rules and guidelines as more important than strict governance, and focus consistently on customer feedback.

• It must provide structures and methodologies for the digital transformation, pursue reasonable approaches that focus on the actual feasibility of solutions, and identify risks and potential.

• It must firmly embed enterprise architecture in a company’s DNA, actively participate in interdisciplinary teams, promote personal responsibility and self-organization, and utilize feedback in short cycles.

Architectural thinking

These principles are objectives that cannot be achieved with a single centralized enterprise architecture approach that is actively employed by only a few individuals. Instead, a broader approach is needed, one that involves architectural thinking, for example. Architectural thinking seeks to establish a collective understanding of “excellent products and services” and thus promotes the creation and operation of an architecture system that can achieve this goal.

This approach assumes that knowledge and understanding of enterprise architecture are firmly embedded throughout a company, which means that enterprise architecture no longer needs to be prescribed and “forced upon” an organization but instead has already become a part of its DNA and therefore can be actively practiced at the company.

Gorges offers two examples to illustrate what this means: “There is collective understanding in society that recycling and using a seatbelt make sense. In a similar manner, architectural thinking seeks to establish the same type of collective understanding with regard to appropriate and effective architectures. The interesting thing here is that the two examples I mentioned have in common the fact that corresponding legislation was introduced after the collective understanding had been established – in other words, no law was needed to compel people to observe these 'guidelines.’”

Developing a minimum viable architecture

In order to ensure that enterprise architecture can respond to changes even more quickly, the workstream recommends the continued use of methods of architectural engineering, which follows the principles of the engineering sciences. With this approach, the results of basic research are combined and processed with empirical application knowledge and knowledge gained from tests in order to create a practical and lightweight set of tools that can be used to develop a minimum viable architecture. “This is a gradual process,” Gorges explains. “In other words, the final architecture is developed step by step over the course of several work sessions, with no final decision on the architecture made until the very end of the process. This ensures sufficient freedom to test things out and learn new things.”

Additional options for speeding up EAM include the early initiation of close cooperation with other departments and units, such as new partners outside the IT organization – e.g. business development partners. The EAM function should also be involved in the entire IMIPO cycle, which consists of the following elements: ideation, modeling, implementation, proving, and operation. The earlier the stage at which EAM becomes involved with these elements, the more quickly a common understanding of architecture will spread throughout the company and the more extensively architecture will be viewed not as something foreign but instead as an integral element of the development and implementation of new business ideas.

Another way to speed up EAM is to use empirical EAM knowledge from past projects (harvesting) that is stored in an architecture repository, for example. Such a repository helps accelerate the process for defining architecture requirements in new projects and also makes it possible to reuse existing standards.

Architecture management of the future

Companies are moving at high speed into an unknown, ever-changing, complex world with an uncertain future. Agile EAM can serve as guide here, as it enables a link to be created between business processes and IT in line with the company’s strategy, and it also incorporates this complex structure of lifecycle-dependent development objects into a process that can be planned and systematically managed. A fine tuned EAM system supports transformation processes and associated projects by  making available reusable architecture elements and secure reference architectures.

Marc Gorges defines the tasks of an agile EAM system as follows: "It must provide security and stability for a company’s digital transformation, much in the same way an electronic stability program (ESP) in an automobile prevents your car from skidding and going off the road in a sharp curve.”

You can download the white paper here:

https://www.cba-lab.de/custom/attachments/1000366/cba_lab_whitepaper_ea_goes_agile_vb.pdf