ArchiMate® Users Group Meeting

By The Open Group

During a special ArchiMate® users group meeting on Wednesday, May 14 in Amsterdam, Andrew Josey, Director of Standards within The Open Group, presented on the ArchiMate certification program and adoption of the language. Andrew is currently managing the standards process for The Open Group, and has recently led the standards development projects for TOGAF® 9.1, ArchiMate 2.1, IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (POSIX), and the core specifications of the Single UNIX Specification, Version 4.

ArchiMate®, a standard of The Open Group, is an open and independent modeling language for Enterprise Architecture that is supported by different 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. ArchiMate is not an isolated development. The relationships with existing methods and techniques, like modeling languages such as UML and BPMN, and methods and frameworks like TOGAF and Zachman, are well-described.

In this talk, Andrew provided an overview of the ArchiMate 2 certification program, including information on the adoption of the ArchiMate modeling language. He gave an overview of the major milestones in the development of Archimate and referred to the Dutch origins of the language. The Dutch Telematica Institute created the Archimate language in the period 2002-2004 and the language is now widespread. There have been over 41,000 downloads of different versions of the ArchiMate specification from more than 150 countries. At 52%, The Netherlands is leading the “Top 10 Certifications by country”. However, the “Top 20 Downloads by country” is dominated by the USA (19%), followed by the UK (14%) and The Netherlands (12%). One of the tools developed to support ArchiMate is Archi, a free open-source tool created by Phil Beauvoir at the University of Bolton in the UK. Since its development, Archi also has grown from a relatively small, home-grown tool to become a widely used open-source resource that averages 3,000 downloads per month and whose community ranges from independent practitioners to Fortune 500 companies. It is no surprise that again, Archi is mostly downloaded in The Netherlands (17.67%), the United States (12.42%) and the United Kingdom (8.81%).

After these noteworthy facts and figures, Henk Jonkers took a deep dive into modeling risk and security. Henk Jonkers is a senior research consultant, involved in BiZZdesign’s innovations in the areas of Enterprise Architecture and engineering. He was one of the main developers of the ArchiMate language, an author of the ArchiMate 1.0 and 2.0 Specifications, and is actively involved in the activities of the ArchiMate Forum of The Open Group. In this talk, Henk showed several examples of how risk and security aspects can be incorporated in Enterprise Architecture models using the ArchiMate language. He also explained how the resulting models could be used to analyze risks and vulnerabilities in the different architectural layers, and to visualize the business impact that they have.

First Henk described the limitations of current approaches – existing information security and risk management methods do not systematically identify potential attacks. They are based on checklists, heuristics and experience. Security controls are applied in a bottom-up way and are not based on a thorough analysis of risks and vulnerabilities. There is no explicit definition of security principles and requirements. Existing systems only focus on IT security. They have difficulties in dealing with complex attacks on socio-technical systems, combining physical and digital access, and social engineering. Current approaches focus on preventive security controls, and corrective and curative controls are not considered. Security by Design is a must, and there is always a trade-off between the risk factor versus process criticality. Henk gave some arguments as to why ArchiMate provides the right building blocks for a solid risk and security architecture. ArchiMate is widely accepted as an open standard for modeling Enterprise Architecture and support is widely available. ArchiMate is also suitable as a basis for qualitative and quantitative analysis. And last but not least: there is a good fit with other Enterprise Architecture and security frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman, SABSA).

“The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”, emeritus professor Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum once said. Using this quote as a starting point, Gerben Wierda focused his speech on the relationship between the ArchiMate language and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In particular he discussed Bruce Silver’s BPMN Method and Style. He stated that ArchiMate and BPMN can exist side by side. Why would you link BPMN and Archimate? According to Gerben there is a fundamental vision behind all of this. “There are unavoidably many ‘models’ of the enterprise that are used. We cannot reduce that to one single model because of fundamentally different uses. We even cannot reduce that to a single meta-model (or pattern/structure) because of fundamentally different requirements. Therefore, what we need to do is look at the documentation of the enterprise as a collection of models with different structures. And what we thus need to do is make this collection coherent.”

Gerben is Lead Enterprise Architect of APG Asset Management, one of the largest Fiduciary Managers (± €330 billion Assets under Management) in the world, with offices in Heerlen, Amsterdam, New York, Hong Kong and Brussels. He has overseen the construction of one of the largest single ArchiMate models in the world to date and is the author of the book “Mastering ArchiMate”, based on his experience in large scale ArchiMate modeling. In his speech, Gerben showed how the leading standards ArchiMate and BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation, an OMG standard) can be used together, creating one structured logically coherent and automatically synchronized description that combines architecture and process details.

Marc Lankhorst, Managing Consultant and Service Line Manager Enterprise Architecture at BiZZdesign, presented on the topic of capability modeling in ArchiMate. As an internationally recognized thought leader on Enterprise Architecture, he guides the development of BiZZdesign’s portfolio of services, methods, techniques and tools in this field. Marc is also active as a consultant in government and finance. In the past, he has managed the development of the ArchiMate language for Enterprise Architecture modeling, now a standard of The Open Group. Marc is a certified TOGAF9 Enterprise Architect and holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Twente and a PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In his speech, Marc discussed different notions of “capability” and outlined the ways in which these might be modeled in ArchiMate. In short, a business capability is something an enterprise does or can do, given the various resources it possesses. Marc described the use of capability-based planning as a way of translating enterprise strategy to architectural choices and look ahead at potential extensions of ArchiMate for capability modeling. Business capabilities provide a high-level view of current and desired abilities of the organization, in relation to strategy and environment. Enterprise Architecture practitioners design extensive models of the enterprise, but these are often difficult to communicate with business leaders. Capabilities form a bridge between the business leaders and the Enterprise Architecture practitioners. They are very helpful in business transformation and are the ratio behind capability based planning, he concluded.

For more information on ArchiMate, please visit:
http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/enterprise/archimate

For information on the Archi tool, please visit: http://www.archimatetool.com/

For information on joining the ArchiMate Forum, please visit: http://www.opengroup.org/getinvolved/forums/archimate