You are right, its an interesting problem.

On the one hand, if you allow local maverick behaviour you can lose so much central control that the organisation tilts into anarchy and ultimately this will have very bad consequences (although this may not become apparent for many months or years).

On the other hand, if the IT architecture does not permit the business to be agile one of two results will occur.
1. The business people will find their own local solutions “despite” the IT function.
2. The business loses competitive advantage to other organisations who have cracked the agility problem.

I don’t pretend to have any panaceas. I do think that there are approaches where central control can be combined with local action. By doing this in a co-ordinated way, business users can have a degree of control and agility within certain boundaries (including security, compliance, change management etc). I am thinking of tools or solutions that are more like end-user computing than strategic enterprise solutions. Not Excel or VB or (perish the thought) Access, but centrally controlled systems with some business user changeability. Workflow systems may have set the trend in this regard but I support this approach in a much wider range of business areas.

In a previous post I mentioned one well intentioned IT Project Manager in charge of a “simple” CRM upgrade who asked the business users if there were any problems that could be mopped up during the project and received 250 requests for change.
This is a worrying sign that the IT community are not meeting the business needs – and indeed falling short by a long way!
I am interested in your future thoughts on this debate and will keep an eye on IASA.

An IASA member named, Ryan Plant, actually follwed a professional architect around for a number of days and had all sorts of interesting comments. I believe he’s published the work somewhere.

Anyway back to the point. While Agile processes have dramatically impacted the quality of software from both a development and business perspective, Ive been seeing some backlash especially surrounding governance. For example, one company I spoke to had more persistence frameworks than they knew what to do with. Many of them blamed the lack of architectural governance for the issue. They made the connection between that flaw and their adoption of an Agile approach.

While Im not convinced that company didnt have those problems before their Scrum adoption Im curious about how well Agile processes have been adapted to an an architectural approach that spans the enterprise. With compliance, portfolio management, change management etc being discussed alongside of SOA and other “Enterprise” initiatives, it strikes me that there in not a solid answer yet.