What Does “Lightweight and Agile EA” Actually Mean?

A practical take on what it really means to keep enterprise architecture useful, sustainable, and fit for purpose

“Let’s make our enterprise architecture (EA) lightweight and agile.”

You’ve heard it before. Maybe even said it yourself.

But what does that actually mean in practice?

Too often, “lightweight EA” sounds good but lacks substance. And leaning down enterprise architecture might sound trendy—but done wrong, it just means leaving out the parts that make it useful in the first place.

In this post, we’ll dig into what a genuinely lightweight and agile EA approach looks like—without cutting corners on the essentials.

Spoiler: It doesn’t mean skipping the hard stuff. It means doing the right stuff—and keeping it sustainable.

Start with the Essentials

Even in the leanest EA setup, you need a minimal, up-to-date baseline of current-state architecture. These aren’t optional—they’re the foundation for all architectural work, including solution architecture.

The absolute essentials typically include:

• Business capabilities or functions

• Application landscape (at least core systems)

• Key integrations or data flows

Without this baseline, it’s impossible to assess impacts, design solutions, or plan change. Lightweight doesn’t mean starting from scratch every time—it means starting smart.

And importantly—this content isn’t just something you create once. It must be maintained.

Support Stakeholders as Needed

Once the baseline is in place, everything else depends on demand.

EA should support stakeholders—top leadership, IT management, portfolio owners, project teams—when and where needed. That means, for example:

• Providing capability assessments and high-level target state views when strategy is being formed

• Designing or supporting solution architecture when a major application is being renewed

• Offering input to major business decisions, perhaps by scenario planning

You don’t have to model everything. But you do have to show up when the work matters.

Keep the Governance Light—but Real

Even the most agile EA approach needs governance. Not bureaucracy, but enough structure to keep things running and relevant.

A lightweight governance model answers a few essential questions:

• Who uses EA content, and for what?

• Who creates and maintains it?

• What gets reviewed, and when?

Here’s the key: governance is what connects EA to the broader management system. It ensures that EA isn’t just a side project—it’s part of how the organization plans, prioritizes, and leads change.

EA without governance isn’t agile. It’s adrift.

Final Thought: Plan Just Enough

Being agile and lightweight doesn’t mean skipping planning—it means planning what actually matters. The goal is to create just enough structure to support how your organization really works.

Start with high-level but comprehensive core descriptions—your modeling library doesn’t need to be huge, but it should be useful from day one. Define your key stakeholders, agree on how you’ll work together, and clarify responsibilities, especially for keeping content up to date. But don’t over-engineer it. You don’t need a six-month governance design phase.

Build the views you need now. Let usage drive what you add next. Let value—not frameworks—be your guide.

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