Why We Like ArchiMate®

What Are Your Thoughts?

By Allen Brown, President & CEO of The Open Group

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of my class graduation from the London Business School MBA program. It was 3 years of working full-time for Unilever and studying every minute possible, and tackling what seemed to be impossible case studies on every subject that you would have to deal with when managing a business.

One of the many core subjects was “Operations Management”: organizing people, materials and technology into an efficient unit. The first thing we were taught was that there are no rules, only pressures and opportunities. The next thing was that there are no boundaries to what can have an impact on the subject: from macro issues of structure and infrastructure to micro issues of marketing, capabilities, location, motivation and much more. It required a lot of analysis and a lot of thinking around realistic solutions of how to change the “now” state.

To support this, one of the techniques we were taught was modeling. There was one case study that I recall was about a small company of less than 150 personnel engaged in the manufacture and development of fast sea-based transport. As part of the analysis I modeled the physical flow system which covered all aspects of the operation from sales to customer feedback and from design to shipment – all in pencil and all on one page. An extract is shown here.

I don’t know if it’s just me but that looks very similar to some ArchiMate® models I have seen. OK there is not a specific box or symbol for the actors and their roles or for identifying processes but it is clear, who is responsible what, the function or process that they perform and the information or instructions they pass to or receive from their colleagues.

So it should not be surprising that I would like ArchiMate®, even before it became a standard of The Open Group and by the same token many people holding senior positions in organizations today, have also been through MBA programs in the past, or some form of executive training and as such would be familiar with the modeling that I and my classmates were taught and would therefore easily understand ArchiMate models.

Since graduating, I have used modeling on many occasions to assist with understanding of complex processes and to identify where problems, bottlenecks, delays and unnecessary costs arise. Almost everyone, wherever they are in the organization has not only understood them but also been able to improve them, with the possible exception of software developers, who still needed UML and BPMN.

An ArchiMate Focus Group

A few months ago I got together with some users of ArchiMate to try to understand its appeal to others. Some were in large financial services businesses, others were in healthcare and others were in consulting and training organizations.

The first challenge, of course, is that different people, in different situations, with different roles in different organizations in different countries and continents will always see things differently. In The Open Group there are more than 300,000 people from over 230 different countries; nearly one third of those people identify themselves as “architects”; and of those “architects” there are more than 3,400 job titles that contain the word architect. There are also more than 3,500 people who identify themselves as CEO, nearly 5,500 CIO’s etc.

So one size definitely will not fit all and neither will a single statement produced by a small number of people sat in a room for a day.

So what we did was to focus mostly on a senior executive in a major financial services company in the United States whose team is responsible for maintaining the business capability map for the company. After that we tested the results with others in the financial services industry, a representative from the healthcare industry and with an experienced consultant and trainer.

Ground Rules for Feedback

Now, what I would like to get feedback on is your views, which is the reason for writing this blog. As always there are some ground rules for feedback:

• Please focus on the constructive
• Please identify the target audience for the messages as closely as you can: e.g. job title / type; industry; geographic location etc

With those thoughts in mind, let me now share what we have so far.

The Value of ArchiMate

For the person that we initially focused on, he felt that The Open Group ArchiMate® Standard is the standard visual language for communicating and managing the impact of change. The reasons behind this are that it bridges between strategy, solutions and execution and it enables explicit communication.

The value of bridging between strategy, solutions and execution is recognized because it:

• Accelerates value delivery
• Integrates between disciplines
• Describes strategic capabilities, milestones and outcomes

Enabling explicit communication is realized because it:

• Improves understanding at all levels of the organization
• Enables a short time to benefit
• Is supported by leading tool vendors

A supporting comment from him was that ArchiMate enables different delivery approaches (e.g. waterfall, agile). From a modeling point of view the diagrams are still the same, but the iteration cycles and utilization of them become very different in the agile method. Interesting thought.

This is obviously different from why I like ArchiMate but also has some similarities (e.g. easily understood by anyone) and it is a perfect example of why we need to recognize the differences and similarities when communicating with different people.

So when we asked others in the financial services whether they agreed or not and to tell us why they like ArchiMate, they all provided great feedback and suggested improvements. They identified two groups

• The CEO, CIO, Business Analyst and Business Architect; and
• Areas of business support and IT and Solution Architects and System Analysts.

All agreed that The Open Group ArchiMate® Standard is the standard visual language. Where they varied was in the next line. For the CEO, CIO, Business Analyst and Business Architect target audience the value of ArchiMate, was realized because:

• It is for modeling the enterprise and managing its change
• It can support strategic alignment and support impact analysis

Instead of “enabling explicit communication” others preferred the simpler, “clarifies complex systems” but the sub-bullets remained the same. One supporting statement was, “I can show a diagram that most people can understand even without technical knowledge”. Another statement, this time in support of the bridging capability was, “It helps me in unifying the languages of business and IT”.

The value of strategic alignment support was realized through ArchiMate because it:

• Allows an integrated view
• Depicts links between drivers and the specific requirements that address them
• Links between motivation and business models

Its support of impact analysis and decision taking recognizes the bridging capability:

• Integrates between disciplines: links between cause and effect
• Describes and allows to identify, strategic capabilities
• Bridges between strategy, solutions and execution

When the target audience changed to areas of business support and IT or to Solution Architects and System Analysts, the next line became:

• It is for communicating and managing change that leverages TOGAF® standard usage
• It can support the development of conceptual representations for the applications and IT platforms and their alignment with business goals

For these audiences the value was still in the ability to clarify complex systems and to bridge between strategy, solutions and execution but the sub-bullets changed significantly:

• Clarifies complex systems
  • Improves understanding at all levels of the organization
  • Allows integration between domains
  • Provides a standard way to represent inputs and outputs between domains
  • Supports having a standard model repository to create views

• Bridges between strategy, solutions and execution
  • Allows views segmentation efficiently
  • Allow a consolidated organizational landscape definition business aligned
  • Supports solutions design definition

Unlike my business school models, ArchiMate models are also understandable to software developers.

The feedback from the healthcare organization was strikingly similar. To give an example format for feedback, I will represent it in a way that would be very helpful if you could use for your comments.

Country: USA

Industry: Healthcare

Target Audience: VP of IT

Positioning statement:

The Open Group ArchiMate® Standard is the standard visual language for communicating and managing change and making the enterprise architecture practice more effective.

It achieves this because it:

• Clarifies complex systems
  • Improves understanding at all levels of the organization
  • Short time to benefit
  • Supported by leading tool vendors
  • Supports a more effective EA delivery
• Bridges between strategy, solutions and execution
  • Accelerates value delivery
  • Integrates between disciplines
  • Describes strategic capabilities, milestones and outcomes

Feedback from an experienced consultant and trainer was:

Country / Region: Latin America

Industry:

Target Audience: Director of Business Architecture, Chief EA, Application Architects

Positioning statement:

The Open Group ArchiMate® Standard is the standard visual language for modeling the organization, leveraging communication with stakeholders and managing change

It achieves this because it:

• Clarifies complex systems and leverage change
  • Improves understanding at all levels of the organization
  • Supported by leading tool vendors
  • Support change impact analysis into the organization and it is a helping tool portfolio management and analysis
  • Supports complex system structures presentation to different stakeholders using a simplified notation
• Bridges between strategy, solutions and execution
  • Accelerates value delivery
  • Integrates between disciplines
  • Describes strategic capabilities, milestones and outcomes
  • Allow a consolidated organizational landscape definition

Your Feedback

All of this gives us some insight into why a few of us like ArchiMate. I would like to know what you like about ArchiMate or how you talk about it to your colleagues and acquaintances.

So please do not hesitate to let me know. Do you agree with the statements that have been made so far? What improvements would you suggest? How do they resonate in your country, your industry, your organization? What different audiences should be addressed and what messages should we use for them?

Please email your feedback to ArchiMateFeedback@opengroup.org.

Allen Brown is President and CEO of The Open Group – a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through IT standards.  He is also President of the Association of Enterprise Architects (AEA).

Allen was appointed President & CEO in 1998.  Prior to joining The Open Group, he held a range of senior financial and general management roles both within his own consulting firm, which he founded in 1987, and other multi-national organizations.

Allen is TOGAF® 9 certified, an MBA alumnus of the London Business School and a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.