New TOGAF Developments in 2022

Steve Nunn, the president and CEO of The Open Group, which is the organization publishing TOGAF, recently provided some insights onto what is planned for 2022. It is great to see that his statements further confirm what I presumed in 2020 about the future development of TOGAF. This article summarizes the most important statements, puts them into context and helps to understand the relevance of TOGAF in the future.

Current State of The Open Group

In his article about 2021 achievements of The Open Group and new developments in 2022, Steve addresses a couple on interesting topics, among others:

• The Open Group celebrated its 25th anniversary last year
• The amount of individuals certified has now reached 115,000. I already addressed this strong growth of certified TOGAF individuals in one of my posts when it just hit the 100,000 mark
• Several specific areas of The Open Group reached milestones. Among them, the release of the OSDU Data Platform Mercury release, the SOSA technical standard for reference architecture, and the FACE training program
• As I noted in 2020, only 3% of all global TOGAF certifications were achieved in China. Being China such a huge market, its clear that The Open Group should put an extra focus on expanding here. In accordance, a particular achievement of 2021 was to translate many documents into Mandarin to ease the usage and increase acceptance
• Other growing markets are also specifially addressed, such as Brasil and India
• Feedback for the ArchiMate 3.1 has been collected and the release is planned for Mid 2022
• IT4IT is also planning to release version 3.0 in the near future
• The Open Group is hosting a Toolkit Tuesday Broadcast Series, which I found quite interesting to listen to!
• The Open Group has also several forums working on activities towards solving urgent current questions, such as Cyber Security, Supply Chain Security, and mass vaccination campaigns
• Lastly, the Open FAIR certification program reached 1,000 certified individuals

What to Expect from TOGAF in 2022

I often hear questions such as: Is TOGAF still relevant for Enterprise Architects? Is TOGAF still relevant nowadays? In 2022? What will replace TOGAF? Is TOGAF outdated? My observation is that TOGAF has still quite some relevance even today. However, some parts of it are outdated. Also, it seems that The Open Group has a new strategy regarding TOGAF and its other certifications, frameworks, and standards in mind. The recent information from Steve Nunn confirm those thoughts.

What is the TOGAF Roadmap 2022?

The relative relevance of TOGAF declines

The (relative) relevance of the TOGAF certification will most likely reduce in the future and it seems that this is also inteded by The Open Group:

• The Open Group lately focusses on numerous other certifications, which in part also cover aspects that one would expect in the TOGAF Standard itself (e.g., Digital Practitioner)
• The current version, TOGAF 9.2, has several outdated chapters, however, a quick update seems not a priority
• In contrast, the TOGAF Standard is supposed to be the stable center of the framework, while a list of supplementing guides are supposed to cover topics that change more frequently
• Compared to version 9.1, TOGAF 9.2 has been conslidated by more than 160 pages

The TOGAF Standard is being restructured

Steve Nunn provides evidence to my thoughts above: The Open Group is currently working on a restructuring of the TOGAF Standard. However, there is still no timeline officially communicated which suggests when a new TOGAF version will be released. In any case, a key aspect to the restructuring is the current work and elaboration of the TOGAF Series Guides. Those focus on topics that are changes more frequently and that need to be updated more often than the content in the TOGAF Standards. Considering the Digital Transformation and current trends and developments in IT, it is likely that rather more content will be categorized as “frequently changing” than “stable”. Hence, another clear indication that the Standard will become less relevant (while the guides will become more important).

UPDATE (APRIL 2022):
The Open Group released TOGAF version 10. Read everything about it here on my blog!

TOGAF Series Guides will replace TOGAF – at least in parts

Given the likely future importance of the TOGAF® Series Guide, let´s take a look at the topics currently covered:

• Organization Mapping
• Architecture Maturity Models
• Architecture Skills Framework
• Information Mapping
• Business Models
• Business Capabilities
• Architecture Project Management
• A Practitioners’ Approach to Developing Enterprise Architecture Following the TOGAF® ADM
• The TOGAF® Leader’s Guide to Establishing and Evolving an EA Capability
• The TOGAF Integrated Information Infrastructure Reference Model (III-RM): An Architected Approach to Boundaryless Information Flow™
• Value Streams
• Business Scenarios
• The TOGAF® Technical Reference Model (TRM)
• Using the TOGAF® Framework to Define and Govern Service-Oriented Architectures

For 2022, Steve Nunn states that The Open Group will further concentrate the digital portfolio of standards and focus on bringing together various standards, creating a useful portfolio for use in the digital enterprise.