DevOps and Organizational Agility

A lot has been written about devops, but not so much on marrying devops with enterprise architecture principles. “An architecture is typically developed because key people have concerns that need to be addressed by the business and IT systems within the organization. Architecture descriptions are formal descriptions of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structural and behavioural properties of the system and its evolution. They define the components or building blocks that make up the overall system, and provide a plan from which products can be procured, and subsystems developed, that will work together to implement the overall system. It thus enables you to manage your overall IT investment in a way that meets the needs of your business”. ArchiMate® 2.1 Specification  

Simply put, do you treat each project as an instance without maintaining the intellectual property created during the project or do you maintain a “blueprint” to ensure organizational agility? Here is the vision statement of a CIO / COO that understands the value of having an organizational agility capability:  

We want to have a single requirements & design repository that will allow for a trusted design process, trusted impact analysis and trusted change process. The value of this vision:

• Is that changes in process is reflected in the design
• The requirements and design repository is a trusted source of information
• Resources will be inducted from a single source of information.
• Compliance to King Ill and Re Use of Intellectual IP is achieved.

Inaccurate information leads to incorrect and costly decisions. The requirements and design repository should facilitate quick and accurate decisions making, taking all aspects and areas of the enterprise into account.  

To achieve this entails process (method), people (trained) & tools (integrated toolset). I will elaborate on this in follow-up post.

The question to ask is, do you have an organizational agility capability or merely executing projects using agile principles? Do you treat your business processes, supporting application architectures and designs as assets or are they created each time for each project? Maintaining a "blueprint" ensures organizational agility where projects can then be executed effectively using agile principles.