Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
By Jim Hietala, VP Security, and Andrew Josey, Director of Standards, The Open Group In this, the final installment of this Open FAIR blog series, we will look at the Open FAIR Certification for People program. In early 2012, The … Continue reading →
Enterprise architecture is relevant for a member of the board! At least, that is what architect believe (or hope?). But CxO’s often do not agree. They do not experience the true value of architecture. What can an architect doe to improve this? Recently, BiZZdesign organized a very successful seminar on Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare. We discussed this topic with attendees and the conclusion are presented in this blog post. An overview of the tips from this meeting:
(There are several posts queuing up for publication here about this shift in direction towards ‘maker of tools for change‘, but this one is a bit more urgent to support a key conversation that’s happening right now. The other posts…
The most common concern our customers voiced in 2014 was the unexpected outcomes of Agile projects. They don’t talk about failure as such. But they do talk about loss of consistency; inability to govern; lack of coordination AND THE INCREASING TIME TO MARKET caused by these precise issues.
I was struck by the results of the Agile Adoption Experiences Survey 2014 published by Scott Ambler. The really significant result to me is that 40% of respondents rates their organizations adoption of Agile as neither a success or a failure. Add to this the categories of Failure, Great Failure and Too early to tell and you have 58% that are not successful! This synchs with my customer feedback referred to above.
The advice my colleagues and I give when customers approach us looking for answers to these questions, is to look at how architecture is integrated into Agile projects. And there are some key areas that we look for in our assessments:
1. Is there a good reference architecture and associated contextual patterns?
2. Are there clear policies attached to work products together with the rationale?
3. Are developers and architects working as a community of interest to evolve the reference architecture, patterns and policies?
4. Are the reference architecture, patterns and policies integrated into the tooling and the architecture runway?
5. Is the architecture runway model based – allowing it to provide a reusable design time platform to be evolved by projects?
Agile projects can be successful in an enterprise situation. But architecture and governance need to be coordinated for consistency and mechanisms (automation) enforced to ensure consistency.
I wonder why the Agile Adoption survey didn’t ask any questions along these lines?
The most common concern our customers voiced in 2014 was the unexpected outcomes of Agile projects. They don’t talk about failure as such. But they do talk about loss of consistency; inability to govern; lack of coordination AND THE INCREASING TIME TO MARKET caused by these precise issues.
I was struck by the results of the Agile Adoption Experiences Survey 2014 published by Scott Ambler. The really significant result to me is that 40% of respondents rates their organizations adoption of Agile as neither a success or a failure. Add to this the categories of Failure, Great Failure and Too early to tell and you have 58% that are not successful! This synchs with my customer feedback referred to above.
The advice my colleagues and I give when customers approach us looking for answers to these questions, is to look at how architecture is integrated into Agile projects. And there are some key areas that we look for in our assessments:
1. Is there a good reference architecture and associated contextual patterns?
2. Are there clear policies attached to work products together with the rationale?
3. Are developers and architects working as a community of interest to evolve the reference architecture, patterns and policies?
4. Are the reference architecture, patterns and policies integrated into the tooling and the architecture runway?
5. Is the architecture runway model based – allowing it to provide a reusable design time platform to be evolved by projects?
Agile projects can be successful in an enterprise situation. But architecture and governance need to be coordinated for consistency and mechanisms (automation) enforced to ensure consistency.
I wonder why the Agile Adoption survey didn’t ask any questions along these lines?
That was the topic of a talk I gave in October last year at an Enterprise Architecture event in London. These are the slides, or most of them, anyway. They probably don’t tell the story by themselves and I’m not going to help them here unless this post provokes a discussion. What I’ll do instead […]
Designing and understanding brands and how the behave as figments of their own is hard enough. Having a simple structure that one can use to design and / or understand a brand makes designing businesses so much easier. More details to come on this topic… The Brand Canvas License This work is licensed under a Creative […]
It has been quite a while since I last posted here and I am very sorry for that. There is so much I want to do and share with the Enterprise Archtecture community which just piles up on a long (very long, indeed) list of things. Among quite some posts …
It has been quite a while since I last posted here and I am very sorry for that. There is so much I want to do and share with the Enterprise Archtecture community which just piles up on a long (very long, indeed) list of things. Among quite some posts …
It’s time to make an end to the arguments that have plagued my professional-life and more for at least the past decade. And the simplest way to do that – to make that ending possible – is to reframe what…
It’s sometimes said that the real collective-noun for architects is an argument – ‘an argument of architects’. We see that often enough on LinkedIn, to be sure… Yet we’ve also seen it way too often on these pages here, or in…
The EU has instigated new sales tax rules which force people selling in the EU to charge the sales tax of the country where the buyer is located. This is a rule designed to fight tax evasion by large companies. … Continue reading →