Architecture & Business in SAFe: Business needs strategy & funding to stay alive. Architecture needs them, too.
Organizations run business, while business delivers value to customers, clients, and users. Therefore, business is never forgotten. New valuable functionalities and features are always considered, as they are most likely to give us a return of our investment. When talking about hardware and software development, architecture and technical activities play an extremely important role. In many organizations, these are usually forgotten, or at least not treated as part of the business. Value may have a different meaning depending on your organization, team, and business. But the truth is, value is what your customer wants or needs. When you look at software development, for example, value means a new working functionality which is usable and proves a business hypothesis that we – as the customer, product manager, product owner, etc. – had in mind when gathering and prioritizing it in a backlog. Architecture, components, integration, deployment – all of those support the business that sits at the top, where it’s usually forgotten.