EA provides a framework for change, linked to both strategic direction and business value. It provides organizational views to manage complexity, support continuous change, and keep an adequate level of balance between risk and innovation. EA is also key to supporting strategic decision-making, providing guidance and guardrails to IT teams that are focused on agile delivery solutions.
For EA to support agility as a practice, architects need to adapt and be able to provide a more “light” slim version and deliver “just enough architecture” in an incremental way, following agile delivery patterns. Also, they should be able to engage and work as a team in different organizational areas, especially with Agile teams. Architects must support organizational transformation and cultural change, cross-cutting all organizational areas.
Enterprise architects must work with Agile teams to provide a high-level organizational view to facilitating the definition of epics and strategy themes that will support the definition of Product backlogs. These will transform later in spring backlogs and user stories to fuel the architectural agile delivery and incremental solution delivery. For this to be achieved the TOGAF Standard definition of Strategy, Segment, and Capability Architectures is highly useful.