What is ArchiMate?
Enterprise Architecture Modelling is becoming more and more important as organisations struggle to understand their capabilities, organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and IT infrastructure. A good architecture practice enables an organization to align business and IT operations with its strategy, quickly respond to changes in the environment, and make optimal use of technological opportunities. The development and maintenance of architectures will lead to efficiency, cost reduction and flexibility.
Just like an architectural drawing in classical building architecture describes the various aspects of the construction and use of a building, ArchiMate offers a common language for describing the construction and operation of business processes, organizational structures, information flows, IT systems, and technical infrastructure. This insight helps the different stakeholders to design, assess, and communicate the consequences of decisions and changes within and between these business domains.
The ArchiMate Architecture Framework
An architecture framework is used to structure the concepts and relationships of the language. It divides the enterprise architecture into a business, application and technology layer. In each layer, three aspects are considered (and are colour coded in the ArchiMate notation): active elements that exhibit behaviour (e.g. Process and Function), an internal structure and elements that define use or communicate information.
One of the objectives of the language is to define the relationships between concepts in different architecture layers. These concepts can then be elaborated using such notations as UML and BPMN.
Archimate is fully supported in all license editions of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.
Dunstan Thomas provide training on how to use ArchiMate with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you model your enterprise using this notation.