Towards an agile design of the enterprise architecture management function

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) management provides an engineering approach for the continuous advancement of the enterprise as a whole. The high number of involved components and their dense web of interdependencies nevertheless form a major challenge for such approach and demand high initial investment into documentations, communications, and analysis. Aforementioned fact has in the past been an impediment for successful EA management in practice. In the field of software engineering recently lightweight and agile methods have become more and more important. These methods aim at quickly creating results, while staying flexible in respect to the design goals to attain. In this article we explore to which extent the de-facto standard for agile methods, namely Scrum, can be applied to EA management. Thereby, we derive challenges for an agile EA management approach and revisit current approaches regarding their agility. Finally, we outline how agile EA management can be implemented based on the method of Scrum. © 2011 IEEE.