Agility requires doing focussed things rapidly. The more you know going in, the better decisions you can make quickly. The more you document what you learn, the more knowledge is available for future efforts. Good agile work fills in more of the picture thereby enabling all teams.
The more of the picture is filled in the more we can avoid wasted effort, align our efforts and deliver with less risk. You can’t create the full picture quickly, which is why many agilists avoid architecture.
But you can start with a “paint by numbers” reference model/ontology, which gives you the framework into which to rapidly record your growing knowledge and which indexes where to look for information for your next effort, and what touches the squares you want to colour, so you know how to be informed and compatible.
Every project (agile or otherwise) should:
Be informed by our knowledge of current architecture assets and challenges
Contribute to an improvement in assets, condition, effectiveness and future readiness
Improve the architecture of the portfolio
Deliver business value
Fill in more of the architecture “big picture” to inform future projects
The environment should:
Have a conherent integrative meta model/shared concepts
Encourage good work through well conceived principles
Have standards for how things get recorded (artefacts) so they are meaningful and sharable
Provide a collaborative repository that holds things and makes them findable