Helping Enterprise Architecture (EA) be Agile with Cloud

Strategic and Operational excellence are key objectives for many organisations. It is difficult for organisations to achieve both at the same time. Most organisations tends to focus on one or another, investing resources in either one. Business often emphasis strategic needs while IT focus on operational excellence. There comes a period where an organization needs to bridge these objectives together. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one such bridge to bring these two objectives together.

Enterprise Architecture (EA)

Enterprise Architecture (EA) aims to provide a holistic view of business and IT with the aim of aligning strategic and operational excellence. It aims to provide a bridge between business and IT with standardized EA framework of common vocabulary, models, tools and content metamodel. However, the notion of EA can be very far fetched and ideal to reality because many of EA program are abstract and conceptual in nature.

Agile and EA

The practices of EA runs contrary to the discipline of Agile. Huge efforts are expended to standardize and collate information at Enterprise level losing sight of Agility. Traditional EA ultimately fails to deliver because it is not able to address the business needs timely. Enterprise strategy become obsolete and irrelevant as technologies innovate faster and faster. As EA continue to remain coupled to traditional waterfall, Agile methods gradually become the mainstay for adapting to business excellence.

How can Cloud help EA be Agile?

Thus, we have seen huge gap of EA in being Agile. Luckily, this can be addressed by Cloud technologies. Any system within cloud platform can be quickly be viewed holistically and automatically be generated as a blueprint of EA. Cloud technologies have also retain its Agile capabilities to fit strategic innovations for business while fulfilling operational excellence.