During the last years, the agile movement, has transformed IT development organizations into very efficient engines, which can deliver the tasks “thrown at it” with a great speed and efficiency, but the outcome of this efficient engine is only as good as is the input.

But when there are different competing views in the organization about what is needed to be built, and the sponsors of all these competing views generate parallel streams of inputs to the IT development engine(s), having in their minds their own target(s), then the output produced would be a chimera – a mix of the pieces from the different targets, put together in the order defined by which sponsor at which time had a strongest bargaining/prioritization position.

To avoid building very efficiently a “Big Ball of Mud”, employing the agile IT development requires, that business will build their own strong business analysis and development organization, capable of developing and maintaining the holistic picture of the target, needed to support execution of the business strategies of the enterprise, and to divide it into the suitable size pieces, which could then be in correct order fed into the IT development pipeline/engine.

During the last years, the agile movement in the IT development, has transformed IT development organization into very efficient pipeline or engine, which can develop software and deliver the tasks “thrown at it” with a great speed and efficiency, but the outcome of this efficient engine is only as good as is the input.

But when there are different competing views in the organization about what is needed to be built, and the sponsors of all these competing views generate parallel streams of inputs to the IT development pipeline(s)/engine(s), having in their minds their own target(s), then the output produced would be a chimera – a mix of the pieces from the different targets, put together in the order defined by which sponsor at which time had a strongest bargaining/prioritization position.

Even if each of the pieces of this “Big Ball of Mud” would be build according to the highest engineering standards, the result would not be fit for executing the enterprise strategies, and whole enterprise landscape would be difficult to improve or evolve.

If previously IT development included also the business analysis and architectural design as part of IT development, where the first stages of the development project, analyzed the full picture and developed the full understanding of what needs to be built, then in agile world this is seen as waste (see YAGNI) and pushed out of the IT development, hoping that this will be done by somebody else before development starts, and that if developments lead us to the dead end, we can always backtrack and redo (refactor) everything.

Because it would be possible frequently to refactor whole enterprise, and because the big picture of the target this is required to avoid “going with great speed and efficiency to nowhere”, somebody else, than IT, in the organization must develop and maintain this big picture.

To avoid building very efficiently such a “Big Ball of Mud”, employing the agile IT development organization requires, that business will build their own strong business analysis and development organization, which is capable of developing and maintaining the holistic picture of the enterprise target, which needs to be built to support execution of the business strategies of the enterprise, and also be able to divide this target into the suitable size pieces, which could then be in correct order (to avoid for example sunk costs) fed into the IT development pipeline/engine.