Enterprise architecture, when performed in a disciplined agile manner, is an important enabler of enterprise. This is true for several reasons:
- Common architecture enables agile teams to focus on value creation. A common enterprise architecture enables reuse across delivery teams. When agile teams have high-quality assets available to reuse they are able to focus on creating new value for their stakeholders and not on reinventing new versions of existing infrastructure.
- Common guidance enables greater consistency. When teams follow effective, common conventions and roadmaps it results in greater quality. This makes it easier to learn about assets that are new to them, and to evolve those assets as needed. Greater consistency also makes it easier for people to move between teams because it will be easier for them to come up to speed on what the new team is doing and to share their skills with those team members.
- Agile architectures enable disaggregation. When your solutions are built from loosely coupled, highly cohesive components it is easier to spread work across smaller teams. This reduces overall risk and organizational complexity, which in turn reduces time-to-delivery.
- Common infrastructure enables continuous delivery by value streams. When there is a common technical infrastructure to delivery teams to deploy into it is easier to deploy. The easier it is to deploy, the more often it makes sense to deploy.
- Enterprise architecture scales agile. A disciplined agile approach to enterprise architecture enables organizations to strategically scale agile strategies across their entire enterprise.