ArchiMate is a framework and a modeling language that is increasingly becoming a new industry standard. Version 1.0 was released in 2004, and the current version, 3.1 was released beginning of 2020. Since 2008, ArchiMate is part of The Open Group, which helped it to become more popular. However, some people say that ArchiMate is too complex, not clear, not easy to use, difficult to read, and hard to understand. If you want to find out more, proceed with reading this article.

 

Development of the Framework

The ArchiMate framework shows a matrix of enterprise architecture layers and aspects. Version 1.0 included the layers of business, application, and technology as well as the aspects of active structure, behavior, and passive structure. The aspects can be compared to aspects of a sentence, such as: “Michael is swimming in the river”, which would correspond to Michael (active structure) is swimming (behavior) in the river (passive structure). Another example would be: “The campaign website provides customer data to the CRM system”. This sentence would accordingly translate into: The campaign website (active sentence) provides customer data (behavior) to the CRM system (passive structure).

ArchiMate 2.0 builds on those basics and adds layers, as well as an additional aspect. The layer that is added is called implementation & migration. This layer describes the actual work packages and what has to be done to achieve the architecture results.

The additional aspect that has been added is motivation. While the active structure refers to the “what”, the behavior refers to “how”, and the behavior aspect refers to “why”. Amending the above example with an explanation of why we do it, we get the following sentence: “The campaign website provides customer data to the CRM system because we want to store all customer data in a central database”.

ArchiMate 3.0 was released in 2016. It added an additional aspect of “physical”, attached to the layer technology. It describes hardware aspects. An example would be IoT sensors that require that software development is adapted to hardware specifications.

Pros and Cons of ArchiMate

The biggest advantage of ArchiMate is that it is a well-established standard. Using it provides all the advantages of using an industry standard: Availability of know-how and resources, training availability on the market, the availability of best practices that have been developed by others, and support by a variety of different tools. In addition, it allows for discussions and comparisons across organizations, as well as integration with other modeling languages such as UML or BPMN. Finally, as ArchiMate also belongs to The Open Group, it is well compatible with using TOGAF. Overall, investing in ArchiMate, e.g. adopting it in an organization, is future proof.

 

On the disadvantages side, people state that ArchiMate is quite complicated, not clear, not easy to read, and not easy to understand. This opinion seems to be supported by every new release of ArchiMate, as every release adds new complexity to the framework and new elements to the notation. The latest version has about 60 different elements that can be used for modeling. While some say that those are too many elements, others say that they are not sufficient to describe everything they would like to describe. Another aspect that is often considered in today´s IT world is whether the tool, approach, or framework supports an agile methodology. For ArchiMate, whose main advantage is to provide structure and illustrate situations clearly, this is not the case.

Summarizing

It seems that ArchiMate is a well-suited notation to use. However, due to the number of different elements, there are only a few people that can read and write it fluently. Comparing this situation to another written language, Chinese, some parallels become clear. While in modern Chinese, there are more than 50,000 different characters (pinyin), it is generally enough to know about 8,000 of them to be able to read and understand most articles in a newspaper. Similarly, it should be possible to learn the most important 20% of ArchiMate elements to read most ArchiMate documentation. To achieve this, there should be two prerequisites achieved:

First, ArchiMate should clearly state which elements of the notation are to be preferably used and which ones should only be used if one would like to be very precise.

Second, stakeholders that are not used to ArchiMate should learn the basics of the notation, including the set of basic elements described above.

For instance, the most important elements of ArchiMate are probably capabilities, processes, technology, and applications. If architects used mainly those elements, it would be much easier for many stakeholders to learn them. However, the most important elements also depend on the use case of the documentation as well as the target audience. Therefore, both aspects should be considered as well.

As it can be challenging to understand which elements of the notation are more frequently used than others, some tools try to provide support for this. Based on the analysis of prior ArchiMate documentation as well as the current modeling, the tool should suggest which elements are likely to follow. Such functionality would surely improve the readability of documentation that has been created by a less experienced author.

Do you have experience with ArchiMate? What is your impression of it?