When people think of establishing or further formalizing an Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice, the notion of having some kind of framework or scaffold with which to establish and scale a successful practice is usually entertained. Unfortunately, there is no “silver bullet” EA framework. That noted, EA Principals strongly recommends working with us (because it really does matter who your guide on this journey is) from the start to create a customized approach for your organization based fundamentally on TOGAF, but streamlined and enriched for better integration into an organization’s ecosystem. 

This must be done without too much disruption while bringing more coherency incrementally in only the way EA can, given its “City Planning” perspective so needed to analyze and succeed at any transformation at any level in an organization’s architecture landscape of myriad interdependent building blocks.

Any customized EA approach must consider Method, Modeling, and Governance as key “pillars” requiring robust and explicit descriptions of each respective one and of how they must interrelate with each other. 

TOGAF has all 3 of these pillars covered but in a common denominator way in terms of method and governance and essentially a vendor-dependent way in terms of modeling. All Architecture Development Method (ADM) Phases must be considered in light of an organization’s size, knowledge, skills, and maturity. 

Therefore, sometimes a very light ADM approach may be needed. The same for the governance challenges. As for modeling, EA Principals strongly recommends ArchiMate as a starter EA language because it comes with its own set of iconography and a free tool. We recommend following this up with a primer on selected BPMN and UML modeling approaches to supplement the capability-based/value stream-oriented strengths in ArchiMate.

In summary, think “Method, Modeling, and Governance (MMG)” set up along three other concepts: “Knowledge, Skills, and Maturity (KSM)”. One must evolve MMG with KSM! EA Principals acknowledges how much easier it is to advise this than to begin operationalizing the concepts. For this reason, we are rolling out new “Monday Morning at 8 AM Tips and Templates” to assist those interested in rapidly and tactically moving out to achieve more value from your ever evolving EA practice. We’ll provide a link to these soon on our Website.

Authored by Dr. Steve Else, Chief Architect & Principal Instructor