Recently, I’ve been reading/re-reading some great related articles that discuss agile architecture and the need recognise the business as a complex adaptive system. Here are a few favourite quotes from those articles:

Is Agile killing EA #1? By Charles Betz “the EA team needs to match the cadence of the Agile teams. This is a central challenge”.

Is Agile killing EA #2? By Jason Bloomberg.

” …if some company’s EA means nothing more than a lot of paperwork that gets in the way of basic goals like working software that keeps customers happy, then we can only hope Agile drives a nail into that coffin. On the other hand, sometimes the paperwork is a good thing. Only an overly dogmatic reading of the Agile Manifesto would lead one to conclude that we don’t need no stinkin’ documentation”.

Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken? By Jason Bloomberg.

“Frameworks are cocaine for executives – they give them a huge rush, and then they move to the next framework”.

Enterprise Architecture Finally Crosses the Chasm by Jason Bloomberg including an interview with Adrian Cockcroft formally the Cloud Architect at Netflix.

“The goal of architecture was to create the right emergent behaviours”.

Formal and informal dynamics of organizational change by Chris Rodgers.

“..it makes more sense for them to pay most attention to the real-world ‘wiggliness’ of organisation: the hidden, messy and informal dynamics of everyday human interaction in which they and everyone else is continuously immersed”.

I’m interested in talking about real-world experiences and emerging techniques for doing “agile architecture’, or business change design, or whatever it gets called in the future. All I know is that it isn’t framework-centric and that many who carry the title Enterprise Architect will have trouble giving up their particular drug of choice! I’m interested to hear what others are doing; what’s working for you – and what doesn’t.

I guess like many of having lived with the ‘EA’ label, I’m tending to avoid the term, so as not to confuse what I do with the framework-centric, heavy modelling, and ‘certified’ practices stuff.

Please take a look at my FoundInDesign blog more about this topic.