Agile & EA: Opposites Attract!

Complimentary Webinar 

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 EA adds value, as it also encompasses other stakeholders than software users and considers 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 EA, Agile and DevOps and show how an agile approach such as the Scaled Agile Framework can fruitfully be combined with an EA method like TOGAF. Finally, he will discuss how the tools of architects and developers can be integrated to provide end-to-end visibility and collaboration. 

 

About Marc Lankhorst

Marc Lankhorst is managing consultant and chief technology evangelist at BiZZdesign. He is responsible for BiZZdesign’s vision, market development, consulting and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture, and for spreading the word on the ArchiMate® language for enterprise architecture modeling,  the Open Group standard of which he has managed the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture and business process management to agile methods, portfolio management and digital business design.

Marc has written numerous scientific and business publications and he is the primary author of two books, “Enterprise Architecture at Work”, which describes the ArchiMate language, and “Agile Service Development”. Marc is a certified TOGAF9 enterprise architect, and holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Twente and a PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.