I recently started studying TOGAF and found it to be very useful. Here are some useful notes about it & Enterprise Architecture in general.
Zachman — Taxonomy: Take everyone’s perspective.
Evolving an EA Capability
I particularly liked this because I have seen most managers not following this basic idea:
“Every enterprise has a different context — the circumstances that led to its creation and current setting must be fully understood and assessed. Without an explicit understanding of an enterprise’s context, there is a risk of carrying an implicit or derived context into the analysis, usually based upon prior experience or an enterprise’s recent past. Proceeding with derived context often results in failure of the EA Capability. Creation of an EA Capability is often associated with change events, and must be aligned with the current context.”
TOGAF is a tool for assisting in the acceptance, production, use & maintenance of enterprise architectures.
Enterprise is basically any organization.
Different Architectures
- Business — basically business requirements
- Data
- Application — application software components & their interactions
- Technology — IT Infrastructure, procedures, standards, etc.
Enterprise Continuum
Provides methods for classifying architectures as they evolve from Generic to Organization Specific Architectures.
