I know, tough one. When we take a look at Enterprise Architecture we tend to think of it as a fast and enormous endeavour. An extensive part of IT that only belongs in large organisations and within the service management organisation, not the project. At least, this is what I used to think about it.
When we take a look at Agile projects, architecture is a largely misunderstood element. This is, because we tend to think off it as the infrastructure our systems are build upon, but EA is so much more than that. We need three things: the technical architecture (the architecture part we used to look at, the infrastructure etcetera), the business architecture (derived from the business processes and the demands and wishes / requirements the architecture needs to be build upon) and the information architecture (the functionality and data within the architecture).
This doesn’t need to be an extensive document that takes months to complete. No, it’s a starting point, a continuous element within our project. Business architecture, for instance, is the definition of the business processes that are within the scope of our project, a description of the organisation and the derived actors within our project, the information architecture is the data, the distribution of data and the functionality. E.G. our user stories fit in perfectly.
In any project, even greatly steered Agile projects, there’s a beginning. A point where we need to define what we need to be doing in our project. Some call it iteration zero, some just start blank and put it into the first iteration, but we need to define the Enterprise Architecture (or better said, the project architecture) somewhere, in the beginning of the project.
Do you have an example of this? Where EA helped the project’s insights instead of putting unnecessary weight on the project.
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I wrote up an example of how I use EA (via the Zachman Framework) in executing the development of Data Architecture. The article, from ModernAnalyst Journal, also includes an interview of John Zachman about how he developed the concept of EA.
http://bit.ly/bxJwQ5
Great resource Loretta, and a great read! Thanks for sharing this with us!
I would like to know more on how you look at the topic and will include a new blogpost on this issue. Can I contact you (LinkedIn?) for further inquiries?
Regards