Enterprise Architecture At Work: Modelling, Com...
The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real-life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.
Enterprise Architecture at Work: Modelling, Com...
Marc Lankhorst is a senior member of scientific staff at Novay (www.novay.nl) where he leads its Service Architectures expertise group. He has managed the ArchiMate project, a co-operation between several partners from industry and academia, concerned with modelling, visualisation and analysis of enterprise architectures, of which this book is a result. Furthermore, he teaches several courses on architecture at universities and other institutes.
An enterprise architecture framework (EA framework) defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models - typically matrices and diagrams - for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.[2]
Enterprise architecture regards the enterprise as a large and complex system or system of systems.[3] To manage the scale and complexity of this system, an architectural framework provides tools and approaches that help architects abstract from the level of detail at which builders work, to bring enterprise design tasks into focus and produce valuable architecture description documentation.
In 1982, when working for IBM and with BSP, John Zachman outlined his framework for enterprise-level "Information Systems Architecture". Then and in later papers, Zachman used the word enterprise as a synonym for business. "Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures."[10] However, in this article the term "Enterprise Architecture" was mentioned only once without any specific definition and all subsequent works of Zachman used the term "Information Systems Architecture".[11][12]
In 1987, John Zachman, who was a marketing specialist at IBM, published the paper, A Framework for Information Systems Architecture.[11] The paper provided a classification scheme for artifacts that describe (at several levels of abstraction) the what, how, where, who, when and why of information systems. Given IBM already employed BSP, Zachman had no need to provide planning process. The paper did not mention enterprise architecture.
In 1994, the Open Group selected TAFIM from the US DoD as a basis for development of TOGAF, where architecture meant IT architecture. TOGAF started out taking a strategic and enterprise-wide, but technology-oriented, view. It emerged from the desire to rationalize a messy IT estate. Right up to version 7, TOGAF was still focused on defining and using a Technical Reference Model (or foundation architecture) to define the platform services required from the technologies that an entire enterprise uses to support business applications.[9]
In 2001, the US Chief CIO council published A practical guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture, which starts, An enterprise architecture (EA) establishes the Agency-wide roadmap to achieve an Agency's mission through optimal performance of its core business processes within an efficient information technology (IT) environment."At that point, the processes in TOGAF, FEAF, EAP and BSP were clearly related.
In 2002/3, in its Enterprise Edition, TOGAF 8 shifted focus from the technology architecture layer to the higher business, data and application layers. It introduced structured analysis, after information technology engineering, which features, for example, mappings of organization units to business functions and data entities to business functions. Today, business functions are often called business capabilities. And many enterprise architects regard their business function/capability hierarchy/map as the fundamental Enterprise Architecture artifact. They relate data entities, use cases, applications and technologies to the functions/capabilities.
A 2008 research project for the development of professional certificates in enterprise and solution architecture by the British Computer Society (BCS) showed that enterprise architecture has always been inseparable from information system architecture, which is natural, since business people need information to make decisions and carry out business processes.[9]
In 2011, the TOGAF 9.1. specification says: "Business planning at the strategy level provides the initial direction to enterprise architecture."[17] Normally, the business principles, business goals, and strategic drivers of the organization are defined elsewhere.[9] In other words, Enterprise Architecture is not a business strategy, planning or management methodology. Enterprise Architecture strives to align business information systems technology with given business strategy, goals and drivers. The TOGAF 9.1 specification clarified, that, "A complete enterprise architecture description should contain all four architecture domains (business, data, application, technology), but the realities of resource and time constraints often mean there is not enough time, funding, or resources to build a top-down, all-inclusive architecture description encompassing all four architecture domains, even if the enterprise scope is [...] less than the full extent of the overall enterprise."[18]
Note that the applications architecture is about the choice of and relationships between applications in the enterprise's application portfolio, not about the internal architecture of a single application (which is often called application architecture).
Many enterprise architecture teams consist of Individuals with Skills aligned with the Enterprise Architecture Domains and sub-domain disciplines. Here are some examples: enterprise business architect, enterprise documentational architect, enterprise application architect, enterprise infrastructure architect, enterprise information architect, etc.
ArchiMate (/ˈɑːrkɪmeɪt/ AR-ki-mayt) is an open and independent enterprise architecture modeling language to support the description, analysis and visualization of architecture within and across business domains[1] in an unambiguous way.
The main concepts and relationships of the ArchiMate language can be seen as a framework, the so-called Archimate Framework:[5] It divides the enterprise architecture into a business, application and technology layer. In each layer, three aspects are considered: active elements, an internal structure and elements that define use or communicate information.
Based on open standards like UML, BPMN and SysML. Supporting enterprise architecture frameworks like TOGAF and UPDM. Integrated custom tools to analyze and visualize running software. Advanced simulation, testing tools, team based repositories, version control and more.
The unambiguous specification and description of components and especially their relationships in an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language. Such a language must enable integrated modelling of architectural domains and should be appreciated both by people from IT and by people with a business background. In this book, we present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. We provide architects with concrete instruments that may improve their architectural practice.
Furthermore, we provide techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Central to the communication of architectures is the notion of viewpoint. Viewpoints define abstractions on the set of models representing the enterprise architecture, each aimed at a particular type of stakeholder and addressing a particular set of concerns.
In order to make the approach we envisage practically feasible, architects require a tool environment, which supports the definition, generation, editing, visualisation, analysis, and management of architecture models and views. Moreover, such an environment should work in concert with existing domain-specific modelling tools, since we cannot expect architects to start using other tools, let alone other languages, than the ones they are used to. We therefore present the design of a viewpoint-driven enterprise modelling environment that can provide just this support, and a vision on the future of model-driven enterprise architecture tooling.
In the first chapter, we give an introduction to architecture in general and enterprise architecture in particular, outline its drivers, and describe the architecture process. Chapter 2 provides an overview of methods and techniques currently used in this field. Following this, we outline the foundations of our approach to enterprise architecture modelling (Chap. 3). We then describe our view of architecture as being primarily a means of communication with all the stakeholders involved (Chap. 4).
For the successful creation and implementation of strategy, Enterprise Architecture is a well-defined process for undertaking enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation. Enterprise Architecture uses architecture best practices and concepts to lead businesses through the technological, business, and informational transformations required to implement their strategy. These procedures make use of the numerous facets of an organization to pinpoint, inspire, and implement these changes. Enterprise Architecture models are often at the heart of digital transformation. 041b061a72