What We Do

Evolution & Innovation Program
The Evolution & Innovation program is concerned with the further development of the ArchiMate language. The intention is to organize several working groups within this program, where each working group is working on several aspects of the ArchiMate language.

Work Groups
ArchiMate will be further developed towards an open world-class standard for enterprise archi¬tecture. The ArchiMate Forum is a platform and community for everyone involved with the use and evolution of ArchiMate. All interested parties are invited to join the community to share knowledge and best practices, to meet peers, and to help develop ArchiMate:

The Usage & Tools work group of the ArchiMate Forum is concerned with the practical use of ArchiMate and its necessary tool support. The group is active since may 2005 and consists of members from end-user organisations, ICT consultancy organisations, tool vendors and education/science organisations. The main goals of this working group are:

• To exchange good practices about the usage of ArchiMate concepts and viewpoints
• To make available these good practices within the ArchiMate community
• To propose improvements on the ArchiMate language (which will result in changes in the ArchiMate Reference Manual)
• To propose improvements and extensions on ArchiMate viewpoints
• To propose useful functionality for tools supporting ArchiMate.

This has resulted in the following deliverables:

• A booklet 'ArchiMate Made Practical' with good practices, in which frequently asked questions concerning ArchiMate are discussed and answered
• A list of proposed improvements on the ArchiMate Reference Manual and ArchiMate Viewpoints

Foundations - The ArchiMate book, as well as the language primer, do indeed report on some of the foundations of the language. Nevertheless, before we extend the language further, tie it to different architecture frameworks, etc, it is necessary to make the foundations of the language more explicit.

Extending the language - In using the language, people come across the desire to extend the language. We will actually discern three kinds of 'extension desires':

1. Adding more aspects ~ For example: value modelling as used in e3Value, more explicit transaction modelling as used in DEMO, business rules, etc.
2. Specialisation of concepts ~ In using ArchiMate, some organisations have a desire to specialise pre-existing ArchiMate modelling concepts into specific sub-classes. To be able to do this in a structured and controllable way, and also to allow tool manufacturers to support this, special mechanisms are needed in the language.
3. Adding more specificity ~ Some users want to add more semantic detail to the ArchiMate models. For example, processes are only modelled at a high level of abstraction. The precise triggering between processes in terms of splits and joins is not included. This is something to be investigated, as it would imply ArchiMate to infringe on pre-existing standards such as BPMN, etc.

Architecture principles - In addition to the 'design oriented' perspective on architecture as taken by ArchiMate, there is a strong need for a 'regulation & guidance oriented' perspective. Both perspectives seem to be needed, and both perspectives are hinted at in the architecture definitions provided by IEEE and TOGAF. This raises the question about the connection between the ArchiMate language and languages for architecture principles.

Architectural patterns - A further perspective on enterprise architecture is a perspective dealing with patterns and styles. How to use ArchiMate to represent architectural patterns? Can patterns be used in helping architects to move from principles to architectural designs?

Return on modelling effort - Creating an ArchiMate model, either depicting a pre-existing situation or a future situation takes effort. How can we ensure this effort repays itself? This leads to several interesting questions:

1. How to flexibly generate views on the model that provide relevant insight, using a language which can indeed be understood by its intended audience.
2. Can ArchiMate be extended with analysis techniques allowing for architecture level analysis of performance, scalability, security, etc?
3. Can the relationships between ArchiMate's architecture-level models and models used at the design and implementation levels (MDA!) be guarded? Checked? Enforced?