The rate of change in markets around the world is forcing businesses to increase their agility in interacting with customers and delivering new products and services faster with higher levels of quality with tighter budgets.
Information technology divisions are feeling the punch and since the publication of the agile manifesto in the early 2001, have been adopting new agile practices to deliver on their mandate. The Agile revolution started as a software development philosophy (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) that depends on establishing a direct link between developers and users, but over the past 15 years the agile practices adopted by development teams influenced other parts of the product delivery life cycle, including the requirement for new project management approaches and governance structures.
Currently, the iterative and incremental SCRUM method of managing the design and build activities in projects are very popular in South Africa, but at the same time it is placing a lot of strain on organisations with traditional IT and business roles like product owners, business analysts, project managers and enterprise architects involved it the software development life cycle.
SCRUM does not include a formal role for a business analyst, causing some confusion in organisations, but in other agile methodologies like the Open Unified Process, the traditional role of a business analyst has changed into an agile role focused on producing and exploring new requirements in collaboration with users, at a different level of detail than before and also assisting the team in identify missing requirements. Overall the business analysts is more of a mentor to developers on how things work in the business domain and also need to stand-in for users only when they're unavailable while also wearing different hats as designer, tester, facilitator, product owner.
As more companies started adopting the agile approach they soon realised that scalability is becoming an issue in complex environments. This was predicted by John Zachman back in the 80s when he wrote in his seminal paper, a Framework for Information Systems Architecture, that some kind of structure (or architecture) is imperative because decentralisation without structure is chaos. Subsequently, Zachman gave his opinion on how to solve the problem when he gave a definition for enterprise architecture in his paper, The issue of the century, where he wrote: "Architecture is that set of design artefacts, or descriptive representations, that are relevant for describing an object such that it can be produced to requirements (quality) as well as maintained over the period of its useful life (change)."
Scott Ambler (founding member of the agile approach) also believes that enterprise architecture is a key component in making agile scalable in organisations, but again traditional architecture practices must be adapted to be more business driven and evolutionary. In his Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) he explains that enterprise architecture should evolve over time, being developed iteratively and introduced incrementally over time. As far back as 2010 he ran a survey where respondents indicated the importance of having collaborative enterprise architects, which is focused on producing artefacts that are useful to the intended audience, are light weight, and ideally are executable.
The biggest challenge faced by organisations adopting these agile practices is communication and collaboration between different team members and project stakeholders, including controls for organisational governance processes and traceability of requirements. These challenges can be overcome by the adoption of a standardised modelling repository to support the adoption of scalable agile methodologies and frameworks within organisations. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the latest methodology trying to address this problem. SAFe extends the traditional agile method with an enterprise architecture component that is used to align the systems development with the business programme roadmap.
With the release of version 11 of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, adopting agile practices on an enterprise scale is so much easier, especially for traditionally smaller or distributed teams. With the release of Enterprise Architect version 11, organisations now have the option to use http and https connections to a repository hosted on a server, virtually anywhere in the world. As part of the server update there is now also a new Reusable Asset Service available that is placing Enterprise Architect 11 directly into the enterprise space with the ability to reference reusable reference models and other shared content directly from the repository.
Together with an updated Specification Management interface and traceably tools for business analysts, the release is enabling teams to better collaborate.
CS Interactive Training has been using Enterprise Architect for a number of years internally and on client projects, but with the release of version 11 we decided to start offering enterprise architect services to clients.
With our experience in business information management (BiSL), enterprise architecture (TOGAF 9 and ArchiMate) and systems development (Open Unified Process & UML) training and methodology consulting we have the skills to configure and design architecture and modelling repositories, and together with our Ample-Cloud Web hosting division, we have the cloud infrastructure to host and manage repositories for our clients at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.
Our solution is perfect for agile development teams, agile business analysis practices, consulting firms, business intelligence teams and architecture teams that need access to a repository from multiple locations with only a normal https or http connection required to access the repository.
With the new updated report publisher within Enterprise Architect 11, it is easier to generate requirements specifications and documentation based on company specific templates. Additionally the new charts and graphs components can give management a great project dashboard on project status that is automatically refreshed on a daily basis.
To learn more about our services from basic cloud-hosted repository hosting to more advanced methodology training and customised repository hosting and support (also available as a cloud services on your own premise) or for a demonstration please contact louw@csinteractivetraining.com or visit www.csinteractivetraining.com.
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