The Open Agile Architecture™ Standard, a standard of The Open Group
The basics
The Open Agile Architecture Standard covers Digital Transformation of the enterprise, together with Agile Transformation of the enterprise.
Summary
The Open Agile Architecture Standard (also known as the
O-AA™ Standard) is an approach to architecture at scale with agility that takes an outcome-based, customer-focused, and product-centered approach to guide business and technology leaders through a Digital Transformation using an Agile approach.
The digital enterprise is shaped by people who work in the context of an enterprise’s organization and culture that needs to evolve toward agility at scale. Agile teams drive the enterprise’s Digital Transformation by inventing new business models, delivering superior customer experience, developing digital products, and architecting highly-automated operating systems.
The O-AA Standard was consciously designed keeping the needs of all businesses stakeholders in mind:
• Business Leaders – to drive the enterprise’s Digital and Agile change journey
• Enterprise Architects – to extend their scope of influence in an Agile at scale world
• Product Managers – to help transform customer experience, innovate products, and generate growth
• Product Owners – to accelerate their transformation from managing feature backlog to steering value delivery
• Operations Managers – to enable them to leverage lean and automation to generate sustainable competitive advantages
• Software Engineers – to leverage the power of digital technologies to co-innovate with the business
The more Agile the enterprise, the faster the learning cycles, and faster learning cycles translate to shorter time-to-market resulting in more agility. By adopting the O-AA Standard, your organization can capitalize on this accelerated learning cycle, meaning your Agile and Digital capabilities continuously and simultaneously co-create one another.
Outcome-Based, Product-Centric, Team-Led
Product-centricity refers to the shift from temporary organizational structures – projects – to permanent ones. A product-centric organization is composed of cross-functional teams which are responsible for developing products or services and operating or running them, with each member bringing expertise from their own domain:
• Executives are looking for innovative business models that generate profitable revenue growth
• Technology Leaders bring flexible and adaptive new software technologies and have popularized new Agile ways of working
• Operation Teams are leveraging capabilities provided by lean, automation, and software platforms to improve operational excellence
• Product Managers bring customer focus to the table along with new disciplines such as design thinking
• Compliance Officers need to ensure that privacy and security regulations remain applied throughout the organization
It also provides a framework and common language for your teams to function effectively to develop and deliver a collaborative, nimble operating model that enables success.
Target audience
• Agilists who need to understand the importance of architecture when shifting toward an Agile at scale model, and who want to learn architecture skills
• Enterprise architects, solution architects, security architects, and software architects who want to stay relevant in an Agile at scale world and who need to learn new architecture skills for the digital age
• Business managers and executives who need to learn the importance of the architecture discipline, and who need to influence architecture decisions
Scope and constraints
The Open Agile Architecture Standard provides guidance and test practices for the transition to Agile and Digital contexts.