ArchiMate ® – in 3 minutes

The basics

ArchiMate ® is an open and independent modelling language for Enterprise Architecture that is supported by different tool vendors and consulting firms. ArchiMate provides instruments to enable Enterprise Architects to describe, analyze, and visualize the relationships among business domains in an unambiguous way.

Target audience

Enterprise architects, business architects, IT architects, application architects, data architects, software architects, systems architects, solutions architects, infrastructure architects, process architects, domain architects, product managers, operational managers, senior managers, project leaders, and anyone committed to work within the reference framework defined by an Enterprise Architecture.

Summary

Developed by the members of The Open Group, ArchiMate ® 2.0 was released in January 2012 and is now more aligned with TOGAF®, the world’s most popular Enterprise Architecture framework. As a result, Enterprise Architects using the language can improve the way key business and IT stakeholders collaborate and adapt to change.

The standard contains the formal definition of ArchiMate as a visual design language, together with concepts for specifying inter-related architectures, and specific viewpoints for typical stakeholders. The standard also includes a chapter addressing considerations regarding language extensions.

The contents of the standard include the following:

• The overall modelling framework that ArchiMate uses
• The structure of the modelling language
• A detailed breakdown of the constituent elements of the modelling framework covering the three layers (Business/ Application/Technology), cross-layer dependencies and alignment, and relationships within the framework
• Architectural viewpoints, including a set of standard viewpoints
• Optional extensions to the framework
• Commentary around future direction of the specification
• Notation overviews and summaries

ArchiMate 2.0 improves collaboration through clearer understanding across multiple functions, including business executives, enterprise architects, systems analysts, software engineers, business process consultants, and infrastructure engineers. The standard enables the creation of fully integrated models of an organization’s Enterprise Architecture, the motivation behind it, and the programs, projects, and migration paths to implement it. ArchiMate already follows terms defined in the TOGAF framework, and version 2.0 of the specification enables modelling throughout the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) cycle.

Scope

The role of the ArchiMate standard is to provide a graphical language for the representation of Enterprise Architectures over time (i.e., including transformation and migration planning), as well as their motivation and rationale. The ArchiMate modelling language provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures, and offers an integrated approach to describe and visualize the different architecture domains together with their underlying relations and dependencies.

The design of the ArchiMate language started from a set of relatively generic concepts (objects and relations), which have been specialized for application at the different architectural layers for an Enterprise Architecture. The most important design restriction on ArchiMate is that it has been explicitly designed
to be as compact as possible, yet still usable for most Enterprise Architecture modelling tasks. In the interest of simplicity of learning and use, ArchiMate has been limited to the concepts that suffice for modelling the proverbial 80% of practical cases.

Want to know more?

Official websites:
pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/archimate2-doc/
www.opengroup.org/archimate

Title: ArchiMate® 2.0 Specification
Author: The Open Group
ISBN: 9789087536923
Price: € 37,95
Order your copy now or view the sample file on our website.