Also on Monday, we heard from Alain Perry from the CIO branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat on how enterprise architecture, supported by the use of TOGAF, is making its way into the Canadian government at all levels. The EA community of practice is supporting the use of TOGAF 9 in order to enable a common vocabulary and taxonomy for creating and using architectural artifacts, and to create reusable reference models, policy instruments and standards to support the architectural work.
Using the classic “city planning” analogy that we hear so often in EA discussions, Perry showed how they break down their levels of detail into strategic/enterprise architecture (“city scapes”) for vision and principles required for long-term direction, program/segment architecture (“district designs”) for specific programs and portfolios to provide context for solution architectures, and solution architecture (“detailed building design and specs”) for a specific project.
They used an adaptation of TOGAF to create the common content model for each of those three levels: architecture vision, architecture requirements, business architecture, architecture (including data and application architecture), technology architecture, and architecture realization.
They’ve created the Canadian Governments Reference Model (CGRM) that allows different levels of government to share standards, tools and capabilities: in Canada, that includes at least federal, provincial and municipal, plus sometimes regional, all with their own political agendas, so this is no mean feat.