ArchiMate 2.0 – Ready for the Future of Enterprise Architecture!

By Henry Franken, BIZZdesign

Models have played an important role in business for a long time. Process models, information- and data models, application landscapes, strategic models, operational models – you name it, organizations have tried it. With the rise of Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a strategic discipline for many organizations, we saw two interesting developments. First of all, organizations try to connect their models, to gain insight in the way the enterprise works from many different perspectives. Secondly, we saw the trend that models become more high-level, focusing on the essence of the organization.

These developments have led to the development of the ArchiMate® language, which allows high-level modeling within a domain, but allows modeling the relations between domains. Even more, in recognition that architecture is a communications game, a key driver for the language was to also allow for effective visualizations for key stakeholders based on solid architectural analyses.

The first edition of the ArchiMate language enabled organizations to create holistic architecture models with concepts from three domains: business, application and technology. With a handful of concepts and relations, this allowed organizations to model the relation between products and services, processes, supporting applications and information, as well as infrastructure. Having modeled this formally, organizations can do impact assessments, generate visualizations for various stakeholders and so on.

ArchiMate has recently been extended by members within the ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group), resulting in ArchiMate 2.0 – a new version of ArchiMate that is fully aligned with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®). Two new extensions have been developed for this purpose, making sure the language now covers the entire Architecture Development Method (ADM) of TOGAF.

The new motivation extension allows organizations to graphically model the answer to the “why” question of EA: Who are key stakeholders of EA? What are their drivers? How do these drivers lead to principles and requirements that are realized in the architecture? This extension mainly aligns with the early phases of the TOGAF ADM.

The new ArchiMate 2.0 standard also has an implementation and migration extension that aligns with the later phases of the ADM. Using this extension, architects can align with project management and graphically model plateaus, projects and programs, as well as their deliverables.

One of the key strengths of ArchiMate – as well as TOGAF – is its openness – it allows practitioners worldwide to join in and help push the language forward. Indeed, we are seeing the adoption of the language, as well as certifications of practitioners grow worldwide.

The Open Group has introduced certification programs for individuals, training vendors and tool vendors, and the uptake of these programs is very successful! We are now seeing many individuals obtaining an ArchiMate 2.0 certificate, training vendors applying for training accreditation, and tool vendors implementing the ArchiMate modeling language into Enterprise Architecture modeling tools, all while  being certified by The Open Group.

With all these great developments within the last few years – fluent integration with TOGAF and a fast growing number of professionals using ArchiMate – I believe it is safe to say that with ArchiMate 2.0 you are ready for the future of Enterprise Architecture!

Henry Franken is the managing director of BiZZdesign and is chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum. As chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum, Henry led the development of the ArchiMate Version 2.o standard. Henry is a speaker at many conferences and has co-authored several international publications and Open Group White Papers. Henry is co-founder of the BPM-Forum. At BiZZdesign, Henry is responsible for research and innovation.