Throughout all of the courses I’ve taken so far in EA, I always wondered how EA would fit into companies who are looking to be more lean and more agile. It seems that one of the main deterrents that companies have in determining if they should implement an enterprise architecture, is that to fully implement it would take a ton of time and a ton of money. Therefore the need to be agile can sometimes outweigh the need for implementing an enterprise architecture. I came across an interesting opinion piece this week by Samir Ahmed, a strategic account manager at Copper Burns Limited, Is Agile Killing the Architect?. It is a follow up to a debate that was conducted last year which resulted in the mindset that Agile has indeed killed the role of the architect. Samir then begins to address a few key takeaways from the debate.

Agile is a Given meaning that agility is the way of the future and is the only way to deliver projects.

Some aspects of business do require centralized thought because there are technical features that would benefit from consistency but there is some debate around if an architect is the one who should be in charge of keeping those features consistent.

Big companies are in trouble without the potential help of architects. Large organizations might not be able to innovate and compete with smaller companies who are embracing agility.

The Name (Again) which addressed if there is any value in being called an “architect”. The conclusion was that there isn’t much value in being a mater builder if being an architect only slowed down projects due to the sake of arbitrarily trying to align to a certain idea of how to do things.

Source:

Ahmed, Samir. “Is Agile Killing the Architect?” Linkedin, 20 Oct. 2016, www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-killing-architect-samir-ahmed/?trackingId=CvIdRMBNsZ2KOpTofmvLFw%3D%3D&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_search_srp_content%3B63bnZwkKQZugvmTfJEvnwQ%3D%3D&licu=urn%3Ali%3Acontrol%3Ad_flagship3_search_srp_content-object.