Agile Enterprise Architecture and DeliveryAgileEAD 2025

Combining agile thinking with proven enterprise architecture strategies can enhance long-term viability and delivery success in complex IT landscapes. Agile is ideal for rapid development and customer-focused features, but in large companies with legacy systems, it can lead to unaligned developments and negative consequences. This has made some IT leaders skeptical of agile.

Conversely, upfront analysis and design of large systems often fail due to lack of management support and difficulty maintaining focus. The challenge is balancing short-term and long-term architectural design to confidently deliver complex solutions. Agile does not mean no documentation or long-term planning. Documentation should facilitate communication, especially in large systems interacting with legacy systems. Proper documentation supports agile approaches and addresses security risks by tracking inventory and data sets.

Long-term planning is crucial to prevent data proliferation and ensure the application landscape supports future development. Organic growth must be balanced with pruning and refactoring. Frameworks and guardrails, like domain definitions and APIs, guide ongoing development of enterprise-wide applications.

TOC - EAD Workshop

1. Basic Definition: What Comprises Enterprise Architecture

• Glossary of important terms and concepts
• Enterprise Architects
• Translate business strategy into digital execution – bridge between IT and business
• Business Representatives – business mindset
• IT Architects – deep IT technical expertise

2. Communication Patterns

• How do enterprise architects interact with:
• The agile IT delivery organization, IT project managers, solution architects, and application architects?
• The likely non-agile business delivery organization?

3. Governance Patterns

a. Roles and Responsibilities

• Approval Process and Guardrails (technology and pattern blueprints – guidance)
• Coordinated management of IT and business project requests
• Upfront risk management
• Assure project success before starting
• Provide guidance/governance until project closing
• Continuous skills and knowledge updates (cloud, AI, security)

b. Neutral & Independent Role of EA

• Evaluate the right solutions for business value – no stake in selling IT products or services
• Future-oriented view:
• NFRs, scaling, maintenance, interoperability, migration, upgrades, EOSL
• Balance trade-offs between:
• Fast new business functionality vs. sustainable IT

4. Documentation Patterns

a. Best Practices for Documentation Supporting Agile Delivery

• Domain Model, Domain Blueprints, Data Flow Diagrams, 4L
• Current State, API definitions, SAD, Business Capability Model, Security by Design
• Current status documentation vs. large-scale transformations, legacy replacement, Big Bang approaches

b. Stakeholder Needs

• What do various stakeholders need from documentation
• Appropriate granularity at each level

5. Delivery Patterns

• Consider IT development and business team capacities
• Breaking down architecture target states into incremental, agile releases:
• Target State V1.0, 2.0, 3.0 (cadence of target states – PI?)
• Balancing strategic vs. tactical priorities, cost vs. time
• Decoupled vs. integrated approaches

6. Is Agile EA Possible?

• Trade-offs between “agile” and “enterprise”

7. Failure Root Cause Analysis

• Causes of recent enterprise architecture and large program delivery failures