Who Drives Modern EA Best Practices and Content?
Today´s content forms the fourth of six parts of the series called “Who is still interested in Enterprise Architecture?”. In this series, I provide my view on the footprint of today´s Enterprise Architecture, the potential death of the role of an Enterprise Architect, the big players, such as TOGAF from The Open Group, AWS, or Azure, as well as the role of EA tool providers and other related certificates and developments on the market.
In today´s part four, I address that the trainings provided by different cloud organizations incorporate important IT and Enterprise Architecture aspects. In addition, modern, agile frameworks cover management aspects of Enterprise Architecture.
Regardless of whether you are reading this article or whether you are listening to the podcast version, make sure to also check out the other parts of the series as soon as they are available!
Who is still interested in Enterprise Architecture?
– Part 4 of 6
EA Best Practices are also Driven by Training Offers from Cloud Organizations
In the last part, we argued that IT and Enterprise Architecture has a high importance for modern cloud providers and cloud organizations. Consequently, the role of the cloud solution architect is one of the most important ones for AWS, Azure, and GCP. As a result, the curricula to gain the certificates for such roles focus not only on cloud and IT architecture aspects, but also incorporate Enterprise Architecture elements. Such elements include:
- general subscription management,
- cloud cost management,
- hybrid- or multi-cloud management,
- and data flows / interfaces with non-cloud systems.
Agile Frameworks Provide Best Practices for the Management Aspect of EAM
As a result, technical and architectural best practices are mainly driven by cloud providers and cloud organizations. However, there are more important aspects to consider. Those include:
- EA roles,
- responsibilities,
- committees,
- and decision-making processes.
Such aspects are covered by modern alternatives to traditional Architecture Design Authorities or Architecture Governance Boards. They are provided by multiple agile frameworks whose goal is the establishment of agile processes across whole departments and organizations. One prominent example of a scaled agile framework is SAFe. It defines the role of an Enterprise Architect, placing it on its Lean Portfolio Management layer.
However, not only SAFe, but also other frameworks provide solutions to modernize orgnizations and processes. Another example is Disciplined Agile or the Spotify Model. For instance, they propose guilds that work as a network or community of people that span across organizational hierarchies and departments. If you want to learn more about the benefits of communities in the EA area, check out the article on it.
What´s your take on today´s part of the series? Happy to read your comments below!
