In this blog series, I discuss the six principles that guide an agile mindset, as discussed in a recent webcast influenced from a book “Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World.” For details on principles 1-2 read the blog: Continuous Architecture: Architect Products Not Solutions and Focus on Quality Attributes. For details principles 3-4 read the blog: Continuous Architecture: Delay Design Decisions and Architect for Change. This blog highlights principle #5 Enable continuous delivery and principle #6 Promote interoperability.
Consider the last two principles that guide an agile mindset to achieve greater business agility
- Enable continuous delivery: The enterprise architect must understand the challenges of how delivery and deployment teams are going to automate the releases of architectural elements. When you design the components, you need to design them so they are automatically released, tested, and deployed.
Planview Portfolios – Capability and Technology Management supports detailed modeling of the process that development and delivery teams use to automate the deployment of technology components. This lets EAs make components design decisions that work well in the process and are easier to automate.
- Promote interoperability: To be agile, you must have the ability to have the interoperability between all the components. More and more organizations are assembling value propositions from application components built at different times, on different technologies. For instance, banks provide banking services, but they work with other organizations to offer customers loans, car, and home insurance. The bank’s combined offering is aimed at the customer, giving them a better experience while keeping the customer tied into the bank promoting customer longevity.
To promote interoperability and to ensure these benefits are received, some EAs are mandating an interoperable open architecture – which is key to agile architecture.
As mentioned in the webcast, the three principles to achieving interoperability are as follows:
- All data is rigorously defined, described, documented, and available
- The data exists in the system of systems, fully independent of any application or function (data is managed by the infrastructure)
- The data repository can be fully distributed and is the single authoritative source in the system of systems
The Planview Portfolios – Capability and Technology Management at its core supports these three principles. The solution provides consolidated views of all technology, services, and applications in a single place, with a single data model that can be analyzed with impactful visualization across the organization. The “single source of truth”.
If you are interested in learning more about how work and resource management solutions like Planview Portfolios can support business agility, register for a demo today.
