Thursday, March 6, 2014

Running and Scaling Virtual Enterprise Architecture in the Digital Age

It has been a while since my last post, but I do plan to get back into a more regular posting mode. The main reason is actually selfish. During the time when I wrote a lot here on my blogs my thoughts became more clear and it was easier for me to drive ideas and decisions. I somewhat forgot to use the cleansing effect of the blog. Every now and then I also got some feedback. That feedback was of course also helping a lot, but the head cleansing effect is by far bigger (that should not discourage you to give me feedback).

I have written every now and then about People, especially in my small series Power, Process, Project, People, a topic which I was happy to share on the Gartner EA Summit 2013 in London. I am invited again to host a roundtable and this time I have chosen the topic "Running and Scaling Virtual Enterprise Architecture in the Digital Age" which is mainly about having a purely virtual Enterprise Architecture team and no dedicated resources in a Power based structure. I plan to blog a bit about that topic over the course of my next posts. Given the fact that the event is hosted by Gartner we talk Enterprise IT Architecture of course. If you happen to be there I am happy to discuss with you, be it on that roundtable or in another place. Just contact me.

The process implementation is a vanilla SCRUM implementation to organize the core team which has a decent amount of time on Architecture topics with an Kanban based add on to manage all other people and their architecture activities. Potentially the whole organization could participate and the target is to increase the usage of the Kanban flow to secure an optimal realization of architecture topics.

The Chief Enterprise Architect (or as my official title is: Director of Enterprise IT Architecture) is taking the SCRUM Role Product Owner. One person is dedicated to the Role SCRUM Master and the core team is the classical SCRUM Team. All other people who are working on Architecture topics get triggered by the core team, so that always a core team member stays on top of the content to secure alignment in the total SCRUM team. Adding and removing people, especially in the Kanban flows, is now a fairly easy task, provided that they do understand the way we document and model.