Agile & Enterprise Architecture: Opposites Attract!

Agile methods have become the norm in software development. But true business agility requires more than having a bunch of agile teams. Moreover, if you only focus on the agility of your development processes, you might miss the forest for the trees: why do you want to be agile as an enterprise, and what does that require?

In smaller organizations, a few agile/DevOps teams can coordinate change amongst themselves, and the lines to management are short enough that strategic direction can be conveyed to teams directly. In large organizations, however, there may be hundreds of agile teams, each working on a part of the big "enterprise machine", and more coordination is needed. If you have agile teams building agile silos that disregard their environment, you will still not have an adaptive and flexible end result. In addition, future change may become even more difficult, which is why good architecture is essential.

And there is more to an enterprise than software. This is where the "big picture" view offered by Enterprise Architecture adds value, as it also encompasses other stakeholders than software users and includes desired (and unwanted!) business outcomes, capabilities to be developed or improved, resources required, business processes, IT and physical infrastructure to be realized, and more.

In this webinar, Marc Lankhorst will address how agility in both methods and products is required to create true business agility. He will address several use-cases for the combination of Enterprise Architecture, agile, and DevOps and show how an agile approach such as the Scaled Agile Framework® can fruitfully be combined with an Enterprise Architecture framework like the TOGAF® standard, a standard of The Open Group. Finally, he will discuss how the tools of architects and developers can be integrated to provide end-to-end visibility and collaboration.