does agile ea equal agile plus ea?

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC

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Does Agile Enterprise Architecture Equal Agile

Plus Architecture?

Jason Bloomberg

President

[email protected]

@TheEbizWizard

About Jason Bloomberg

• President of Intellyx

• Advise companies on their digital transformation initiatives & help vendors communicate their agility stories

• Write for Forbes and Wired on Digital Transformation

• Buy my latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

Open Group Starting Point

“EA needs to catch up with the agile approach, not ‘Agile as such’.”

“‘Agile’ is a loaded term and largely associated with building solutions rather than the Enterprise Architecture.”

Allen Brown, President & CEO The Open Group


“Agile” Starting Point: The Agile Manifesto

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:

– Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items onthe right, we value the items on the left more.


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Context: Software Development

• Focus on small teams that crank out code

• Iterative, self-organizing, collaborative

• Focus on creating working software


Well-run Agile development means producing a lot of good software

quickly

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What about Architecture on Agile Projects?

• We don’t need no stinkin’ architecture!

• Architecture lumped in with documentation (less is more)

• Architects slow down developers

• Architects produce artifacts that aren’t Agile

– Lead to extra work


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Widespread belief that Agile and Architecture don’t mix

Why Agile Software Architecture isn’t Agile

• Agile movement focuses on working software

– Focus on getting the software to meet its requirements

– Get all roadblocks out of the way

• Agile-built software is coded to be fit for purpose


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The Goal of Agile Software

• Requirement to build software that responds to changing requirements

• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development & deployment

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Extending the Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– As a system of people & technology, the enterprise is more about people

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Technology must actually work to enable agility

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Slice across the silos

• Responding to change over following a plan

– Architect for change


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Scaling Agile for the Enterprise

• Enterprise Architecture context

– Organization, process, technology, and information

• Legacy context

– Existing applications, middleware, systems of record

• Business focused, iterative, get stuff to work, iconoclastic


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Agile EA & Architecture Frameworks

• Architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman, DoDAF, etc.) do not adequately address business agility

– Difficult to use properly

– Can help achieve baseline or specific business outcomes


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What about Agility?

• Business agility is a metarequirement

• Requirement that requirement change must be supported


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Requirement: Make the Organization More Agile

“Meta” Thinking

• Remember, we’re architecting for change

• Agile architect doesn’t think about the thing, but about how it changes

• Metaprocesses

– Processes for creating, managing, changing processes

• Metapolicies

– Policies for creating, managing, changing policies

– In other words, policies for how to do governance


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Change at the Meta Level

• In fact, your entire architecture subject to change

• We need a meta-architecture: an architecture for building inherently dynamic architectures

• The key to thinking like an Agile Architect!


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Different Meanings of “Agile”

• “Agile-with-a-capital-A”

–Software development that follows the Agile Manifesto

• General meaning of “agile”

–Business agility as property of an organization


Business Agility

• Responsiveness

– Tactical value

• Resilience

– Risk mitigation

• Innovativeness

– Strategic value

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Ability to respond to change in the business environment and leverage change for competitive advantage

Understanding the Business Agility Driver

• Architects must recognize and identify agility drivers

• Stakeholders may or may not identify drivers as such

• Business drivers always connect to bottom line (and mission priority in public sector)


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Architecting Human-Technology Systems

• Architecting technology isn’t enough

• You have to architect the people as well

• Organizational and process layers rightfully part of EA

• Business architecture also focuses on human behavior


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Architecting People?

• Governance: creating, communicating, and enforcing policies

– Apply to both human & technology behavior

– Policy-related processes

• Automated & lightweight

• Focus on important policies

– Security

– Regulatory compliance

– Software interface standards


Not a traditional approach to governance!

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Where’s Our Business Agility?

• Organizations must be responsive, resilient, and innovative

• Business agility is a property of the enterprise

• People and technology can be flexible as well, but we must architect our organizations to be agile


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Introducing Complex Adaptive Systems

• Systems of systems that exhibit emergent properties

– Properties of system as a whole

• Component systems can be human, technology, etc.

• Self-organizing


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Enterprise as Complex Adaptive System

• Business agility is property of organization as a whole, hence an emergent property of the organization

• Enterprise is system of systems that exhibits emergent properties

– System of people and technology


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Business Agility as Emergent Property of Enterprise

• We want our organizations to be agile

• Individual subsystems (people or technology) can be flexible, but business agility is a property of the enterprise (or possibly portions of the enterprise)

• Innovativeness, resilience, responsiveness also emergent


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Engineering a Complex System

• Architecture focuses on the overall design of a system

– How all components of the system must work together to achieve business goals

• Engineering focuses on the best way to build and run a system

– Lifecycle best practices (quality assurance, deployment, updates, etc.)

– Compliance with architecture


Agile principle: respond to change over following a plan

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At the Heart of Agile Architecture

• Think of the enterprise as a system of systems

– Component systems are people and technology systems

• We must architect the organization so entire enterprise exhibits business agility

• We can only engineerbusiness agility via its component systems

• Change is constant & how changes to component systems affect the enterprise is unpredictable


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Complex vs. Traditional Systems

• Avoid emergent properties in traditional systems

• Traditional system: given requirements, build to requirements

• Complex system: establish initial conditions and rules for behavior of component systems, and emergence takes care of itself

– Feedback loops are common


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The Secret to Emergence

• Rules that affect behavior of component systems can be very simple

• Emergent behaviors often unpredictable

• Try something, see what happens, repeat

• Feedback loops & iterative approaches


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Sound Agile to You?

Continuous Business Transformation

• With Agile EA there is no to-be architecture

– Not in the physical sense

• Instead, the focus of the architecture is expecting and supporting ongoing change by specifying technology that is inherently flexible

• Architects must begin at the Meta layer


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There’s More to This Story!


does agile ea equal agile plus ea?

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