As a technically focused organization we quite often get confronted with the software architecture in our projects with our customers, or more precisely with the solution architecture. In many cases it is ok for us to stay in this scope and not to touch other, much wider architectural concepts like e.g. enterprise architecture. However, due to the fact, that more and more organizations want to transform to a more agile organization, the alignment between IT and Business, and thus between IT-architecture and Business-architecture becomes much more relevant for us in our projects than in the past.

With this post I want to announce a short series of blog articles about the following topics:

• Business Architecture
• Enterprise Architecture
• Lean & Agile Architecture
• Venture Architecture

As you can see we will talk about different flavors of architecture in the agile context. So let us now start with the answer what the architecture is:

The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment and the principles guiding its design and evolution. (IEEE1471 2007)

…and here my favorite one:

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. (Booch 2006)

I hope you will enjoy our new series. Stay tuned.