I recently had a briefing from The Open Group’s CEO Allen Brown and Judith Jones, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Architecting the Enterprise, on the new version of the TOGAF enterprise architecture framework announced today.
For those of you not up on your enterprise architecture, TOGAF is a product of The Open Group, a standards consortium that’s been around for more than 25 years, with 7,800 participants in 350 different enterprises, including both end-customer organization and vendors. By allowing each enterprise to have only one vote, it tends to level the playing field and allow smaller vendors and customers to have just as much of a voice as large vendors that might normally dominate standards development.
The TOGAF framework is seeing widespread usage since it works together with other EA frameworks and concepts such as model-driven architecture, rather that competing with them. They’ve been seeing a growing demand for TOGAF 8 certified people, of which there are about 9,000 worldwide.
TOGAF 9 was developed in response to the needs of The Open Group’s members:
- Closer alignment with the business
- Simple implementation and greater usability
- Evolution rather than revolution in order to preserve value in existing investments
Version 9 has a number of new features over version 8:
- Further detail on the Architectural Development Method (the diagram of interconnected circles with activities A-H surrounding Requirements Management), including guidelines and techniques on its usage.
- Modular structure, promoting incremental adoption and greater usability.
- Content framework, providing a Zachman-like categorization framework for EA artifacts; in fact, they have a mapping between TOGAF and Zachman since these might be used in the same environment.
- Explicit consideration of architecture styles, e.g., SOA.
They’ve added quite a bit more material to TOGAF in this version, plus enhanced certifications. The certification program for TOGAF 9 is exam-based (rather than the current training-based certification with an optional exam), with 2 levels of certification: foundation and advanced. There’s also an exam to recertify people from TOGAF 8 to 9.
The biggest adoption for TOGAF has been in the UK and North America, which is likely driven in part by language translation of the materials, but there are other organizations in Europe, Australia and Asia starting to use it as well.
One good thing that is coming to attention that Enterprise Architecture is not a project to be done and forgotten. Rather it is a ‘business as usual’ activity. Every enterprise has some architecture (may not be the best). Enterprises can only improve what they already have. There is no option of replacing existing architecture with a new shiny one in one fall swoop. It needs an evolutionary approach. TOGAF does support that thinking and makes it implementable.
That’s a great point, Vilas: EA is often done as a monolithic disconnected project, doomed to failure by both of those characteristics. An incremental approach using something like TOGAF makes it easier to adopt as it evolves.
I see acceptance of technology certifications (e.g: Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle etc.) is more prevalent in the industry vs vendor agnostic cerfication like TOGAF. I do understand the great benefits that TOGAF brings to the table, however, the stakeholders are not realizing these benefits and this is resulting in weak acceptance and adoption of TOGAF in the enterprise. How can this be improved so that every enterprise will atleast have a TOGAF certifed EA? Any thoughts and comments are welcome.