What’s New in ArchiMate 3

What’s New in ArchiMate 3?

13-16 minutes

The ArchiMate Specification, an Open Group Standard, is an open and independent modeling language for Enterprise Architecture modeling. This article provides an overview of the ArchiMate 3.0 Specification which is a major update to the ArchiMate 2.1Specification and was published as an Open Group Standard in June 2016.

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Purpose of ArchiMate

• The ArchiMate language enables Enterprise Architects to describe, analyze, and visualize the relationships among architecture domains in an unambiguous way.
• Just like an architectural drawing in classical building architecture describes the various aspects of the construction and use of a building.
• The ArchiMate language offers a common language for describing the construction and operation of business processes, organizational structures, information flows, IT systems, and technical and physical infrastructure.
• ArchiMate models enable stakeholders to design, assess, and communicate the consequences of decisions and changes within and between these architecture domains.

New Features in ArchiMate 3

New features included in Version 3.0 include new elements for modeling capabilities:

• The enterprise at a strategic level, such as capability, resource, and outcome.
• The physical world of materials and equipment.
• The consistency and structure of the language have been improved, definitions have been aligned with other standards
• The enhancement in usability in various other ways.

The Origin of ArchiMate Visual Modeling Language

The ArchiMate modeling language provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures, and offers an integrated approach to describe and visualize the different architecture domains together with their underlying relations and dependencies. The role of the ArchiMate Specification is to provide a graphical language for the representation of Enterprise Architectures which includes:

• Strategic, transformation
• Migration planning
• Motivation and rationale

The design of the ArchiMate language started from a set of relatively generic concepts(objects and relations), which have been specialized for application at the different architectural layers of an Enterprise Architecture.

The Goals of ArchiMate 3

The most important goal for the ArchiMate 3 is that:

It has been explicitly designed to be as compact as possible, yet still usable for most Enterprise Architecture modeling tasks.

In the interest of simplicity of learning and use, the language has been limited to the concepts that suffice for modeling the proverbial 80% of practical cases.

ArchiMate 3 Enhancements

The new version of the language has been created to respond to a number of requirements:

• Increasing demand for relating business strategy with business and IT operations
• Technology innovations that mix IT and the physical world
• Usage in new domains; e.g., manufacturing, logistics Improved consistency and comprehensibility
• Improved alignment between Open Group standards, notably with the TOGAF Framework