Many large organizations still work with centralized architecture-related teams. Their role is often to provide architectural specifications to other teams and ensure that these specifications are adhered to during implementation. These teams are often referred to as "ivory tower architecture" teams that aim to bundle highly skilled architects. This role is certainly not available in abundance on the market.

However, they do not fit into an agile environment where we want to give teams the opportunity to make their own decisions. Certain guard rails are nevertheless necessary to ensure that the overall construct works. In addition, well-chosen guard rails can also drastically reduce the need for coordination between teams.

We need to enable these teams to do most of the architectural work themselves, while ensuring that the individual parts fit together. This is where Team Topologies, a concept introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, comes into play. There is a team type called the " Enabling Team" which, in a nutshell, supports other teams with knowledge and methodology.

This presentation will give you an overview of this change as well as practical guidance on how to transform a centralized architecture team into an enabling team whose task is to improve the architecture work in other teams. You will learn:
- Which stakeholders you should involve in this process
- Why the future enabling team also needs to be empowered and how to do this
- Where common pitfalls lie on this journey
- Why this journey needs to be done in an agile way with continuous learning and retrospectives

This talk will also include many real-life examples that accompany such a transformation.

In his book The Software Architect Elevator Gregor Hohpe uses the analogy of an elevator in a high building for the daily work which software architects should be doing: They are supposed to talk to folks who build and maintain stuff in the engine room but also make sure that the managment which is residing on the penthouse floors understand and gain interest in what is happening in the engine room.

In my talk I will build upon Gregors ideas and show you how you can leverage ideas from Domain Driven Design in this daunting communication tasks. But rest assured: I will not only present the obvious strategic Domain Drivend Design elements like core / supporting / generic subdomains here. We will go deeper and explore links to other initiatives in an org like DevOps, Agile and / org Design Thinking as well which are of interest for the leadership of an organization.

We as a community should get better at this topic because Domain Driven Design needs a healthy, blame free and safe environment in order to flourish and this environment needs to be established and lived by the leadership folks.

PS: The talk idea and usage of Gregors elevator analogy have been approved by Gregor