Adaptation of enterprise architecture efforts to an agile environment

Abstract

Agile ways of working have become mainstream, with many organisations practising a form of agile. Agile maturity among those organisations differs. In a research conducted by VersionOne Inc. (2016), 82% of the participating organisations stated to be at or below the level of ‘still maturing’. Existing agile and architecture methods have begun to incorporate some aspects of each other, with agile methods including architecting, such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and architecture frameworks such as TOGAF (the Open Group Architecture Framework), adding agile elements (Poort, 2014). This study addresses the question how to shape the architecture function to effectively achieve compliance with architecture regulations, of solutions realised in an agile environment. To answer this question a multiple-case study was done, studying three different organisations. The findings are translated into seven propositions