TOGAF and Enterprise Architecture

Introduction

As the business environment becomes more sophisticated, the challenges facing organizations are shifting away from questions of efficiency and automation towards questions of complexity management and business agility. Complex webs of existing applications and interfaces create highly complex landscapes where change becomes more and more difficult and the impacts of change become harder to predict and understand. Considering this, Thousands of companies worldwide have adopted and adapted TOGAF to transform their businesses. Since its inception more than two decades ago, TOGAF, an Open Group standard, has grown to become the de facto global framework for creating Enterprise Architectures.

TOGAF

TOGAF is an architecture framework. TOGAF provides the methods and tools for assisting in the acceptance, production, use, and maintenance of an enterprise architecture. It is based on an iterative process model supported by best practices and a re-usable set of existing architecture assets.

Architecture in terms of TOGAF

The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.

  

Blend of Business & Enterprise Architecture (TOGAF)

The essence of enterprise architecture is that it provides insight into how various aspects in the enterprise are related. It translates strategy into principles, concepts and models that provide a vision and guidance for design and development. Enterprise architecture is different from solution architecture; it only provides overview and direction and considers the systems to be developed as a black box. Solution architecture opens this black box, describing the structure and decisions in the box. Enterprise architecture is an instrument for determining which Agile projects are valuable. It describes a vision that should be realized, and identifies the applications and projects that are needed to support this vision. Applications are only described as a black box in the enterprise architecture; High-level business requirements identified in the enterprise architecture can be refined into epics and user stories by the Agile project. TOGAF is an important standard with respect to enterprise architecture. TOGAF architecture is the structure of components, their inter relationships and the principles and guidelines governing their design & evolution over time. It is a formal description of a system or a detailed plan of a system at component level to guide its implementation level. TOGAF architecture deals with 4 kinds of architecture:

• Business Architecture
• Deals with business processes, governance, business strategy and organization.
• Application Architecture
• This architecture provides blueprints of individual applications to be deployed, their interactions and their relationships to the core business processes of organization.
• Data Architecture
• This architecture provides the logical and physical data assets and data management resources.
• Technology Architecture
• This architecture contains logical software and hardware capabilities that required to support business, data and application services. It includes networks, communications, IT infrastructure etc...

Why TOGAF?

The TOGAF framework has been tried, tested, validated in many organizations around the world. This framework can be used with other existing management frameworks that your business/organization may use. Organization should pick a framework which will develop the type of artifacts that are needed which are specific to your organization’s needs. When you implement processes, procedures, governance, and structure to manage your enterprise architecture then you should see greater corporate agility, communication, collaboration, and better decision making by corporate executives. What makes TOGAF important to the enterprise architecture community is that it is a framework which is built on open standards. This translates to organizations being able to use TOGAF as their enterprise architecture framework for free. They do not have to pay any organization maintenance cost or anything to implement this framework. Companies are always looking for ways to save money especially with cuts in corporate budgets and the need to do more work with less resources.

Conclusion
In short, enterprise architecture implementation will require a deep knowledge and awareness of all of the business transformation factors that impact transitioning from current state to the visionary state. Any Implementation and Migration Plan has to take both into consideration. Neglecting these and focusing on the technical aspects will invariably result in a lackluster implementation that falls short of realizing the real promise of a visionary enterprise architecture.