What is ArchiMate

What is ArchiMate?

9-12 minutes

ArchiMate is The Open Group ‘s open and independent modelling language for enterprise architecture, supported by different tool vendors and consulting firms. ArchiMate provides instruments to support enterprise architects in describing, analyzing and visualizing the relationships among different architecture domains in an unambiguous way, similar to those well-established disciplines like civil engineering or building and construction using internationally accepted standards for describing their designs.

ArchiMate is a modelling technique (“language”) for describing enterprise architectures. It presents a clear set of concepts within and relationships between architecture domains, and offers a simple and uniform structure for describing the contents of these domains. Just like an architectural drawing in classical building architecture describes the various aspects of the construction and use of a building,

ArchiMate offers a common language for describing the construction and operation of:

• Business processes
• Organizational structures
• Information flows
• IT systems Technical infrastructure.

This insight helps stakeholders to design, assess, and communicate the consequences of decisions and changes within and between these business domains.

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Why ArchiMate?

Models have played an important role in business for a long time. Process models, information- and data models, application landscapes, strategic models, operational models. Organizations try to connect their models, to gain insight in the way the enterprise works from many different perspectives. Typically, 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.

As shown the Figure above, the main reasons for enterprise architect to adopt ArchiMate are as follows:

• Capture stakeholder concerns
• Address concerns by identifying and refining requirements
• Create EA models
• Create views of the model for stakeholders
• show how concerns and requirements will be addressed
• show trade-offs arising from conflicting concerns

Benefits of ArchiMate

The main benefits of ArchiMate for modeling your enterprise architectures are:

• It is an international, vendor-independent standard of The Open Group, liberating you from the lock-in of vendor-specific tools and frameworks. There is active support from the ArchiMate Forum of The Open Group.
• Its well-founded concepts and models provide precision. It helps you get away from the ‘fuzzy pictures’ image of architecture.
• It is a lean and simple language. It contains just enough concepts for modeling enterprise architecture and is not bloated to include everything possible. Its uniform structure makes it easy to learn and apply.
• It has clear links to existing approaches for specific architecture areas such as software or business processes. Several concepts in ArchiMate have deliberately been borrowed from other languages such as UML or BPMN, to provide an easy bridge.
• It does not prescribe a way of working, but it is easily combined with existing methods such as TOGAF. It has been tried and tested by many different user organizations and is supported by numerous consultancies and software tools.