Bimodal Enterprise Architecture Management: The Emergence of a New EAM Function for a BizDevOps-Based Fast IT

Abstract

During the last years, many companies established fast IT or digital IT units dedicated to build and operate digital customer-facing services. These units adopted agile methods, new tool chains as well as new organizational settings like BizDevOps teams. BizDevOps teams are responsible for continuously (re-)defining business functionality of certain (micro-)services, (re-)developing and running them. In these new fast IT environments, the role of enterprise architecture management changes dramatically. BizDevOps teams have a high degree of autonomy in designing both, the functionality and the architecture of their (micro-)services and thus contribute to business-IT-alignment in a new way. Nevertheless, a central enterprise architecture management (EAM) function is still required for supporting the teams regarding cross-team and cross-service issues. Furthermore, as many companies still run the traditional IT function side-by-side with the new IT function, the EAM functions of both parts have to cooperate. Based on a single case study, we discuss the emergence of a new EAM function ("fast IT EAM"), changing tasks and processes, implications for EA models and challenges for the integration of the traditional EAM and the fast IT EAM functions.