A great deal of IT Architects aren’t big fans of modeling languages, modell driven development and modeling tools. MS PowerPoint, Visio or other drawing tools are far too often used as a surrogate for a more structured approach. However communicating ideas clearly is crucial for an IT architect and not everything can be easily explained with words, and PowerPoint drawings are often too ambiguous in expression. Creating comprehensive diagrams and modells that clearly express the ideas is still crucial for IT Architects and developers to be able to communicate the ideas both in within the development teams. It is also crucial for efficient communication with other parties including the business stakeholders.
For the Enterprise Architects over long time there was no good alternative to UML. UML is good for low level software modeling in particular application architecture. It is far less useful when communicating with business. There existed BPMN, but it was mainly covering process related modeling and not covering all the needs related to modeling strategy, tactics or even the business processes.
This was the situation until the arrival of ArchiMate in 2009. Based on IEEE 1471, developed by ABN AMRO and introduced by The Open Group The Open Group. Archimate defines three main layers: Business, Application, and Technology:
- Business layer describes business processes, services, functions, and events. It describes the products and services offered to the external customers
- Application layer describes application services and components
- Technology layer describes hardware, communication infrastructure, and system software
Those three layers provide a structured way of bridging the different perspectives from business to technology and infrastructure.
However, the full model of ArchiMate 3.0 also brings or enhance another three very useful layers:
- Strategy and Motivation layer – introduced in 2016 in ArchiMate 3.0 for modeling of the capabilities of an organization and help to explain the impact of changes on the business (gives a better connection between strategic and tactic planning)
- Implementation and Migration layer – supports modeling related to project, portfolio or program management
- Physical layer – for modeling physical assets like factories
These last three layers are crucial to properly bridge together the world of business with software and technology. In that sense, ArchiMate is bringing a new quality when it comes to modeling languages. ArchiMate 3.0 is also tightly connected and aligned with TOGAF 9.1 which makes it even more suitable as a new state of the art modeling language.
Summing up, ArchiMate 3.0 brings several new capabilities and qualities to modeling, which makes it a great tool for the digital age, where we are not only supposed to model the software and technology itself, but where it becomes increasingly important to be able to link the business models, strategy, tactics to the actual business processes and finally applications and technology.
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