Managing Enterprise Architecture in Agile Environments

Abstract

Throughout the last decade agile practices have become the de facto standard within many organizations to run especially complex IT projects where the solution is not fully understood when starting the project. Due to the distributed and self-organizing nature of agile environments, it is a challenge for organizations to ensure alignment and avoid local optimizations which contradict overarching enterprise goals. Enterprise Architecture (EA) supports organizations to ensure this alignment. However, in order to be effective in agile environments approaches to EA need to be adjusted. Given the recent mainstream adoption of agile practices addressing this challenge becomes increasingly important. This contribution reviews existing approaches to agile EA and derives hypotheses on how to design an EA methodology for agile environments.