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How the ArchiMate Modeling
Standard Helps Enterprise Architects
Deliver Greater Business Agility and
Successful Digital Transformation
Transcript of a discussion on how companies and governments can better produce rapid
innovation and manage complexity across their IT and business operations.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open
Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and
you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Our next business trends discussion explores how the
latest update to the ArchiMate® standard helps Enterprise Architects (EAs) make
complex organizations more agile and productive.
Joining me is Marc Lankhorst, Managing Consultant and
Chief Technology Evangelist at BiZZdesign in The
Netherlands, and he also leads the development team
within the ArchiMate Forum at The Open Group.
Welcome, Marc.
Marc Lankhorst: Thank you.
Gardner: There are many big changes happening within
IT, business, and the confluence of both. We are talking
about Agile processes, lean development, DevOps, the
ways that organizations are addressing rapidly changing
business environments and requirements.
Companies today want to transform digitally to improve their business outcomes. How
does Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a practice and specifically the ArchiMate standard
support being more agile and lean?
Lankhorst: The key role of enterprise architecture in that context is to control and
reduce complexity, because complexity is the enemy of change. If everything is
connected to everything else, it’s too difficult to make any changes, because of all of the
moving parts.
And one of the key tools is to have models of your architecture to create insights into
how things are connected so you know what happens if you change something. You can
Lankhorst

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design where you want to go by making something that is easier to change from your
current state.
Stay flexible, move with the times
It’s a misunderstanding that if you have Agile development processes like Scrum or
SAFe then eventually your company will also become an agile organization. It’s not
enough. It’s important, but if you have an agile process and you are still pouring
concrete, the end result will still be inflexibility.
So the key role of architecture is to
ensure that you have flexibility in the
short-term and in the long-term. Models
are a great help in that. And that’s of
course where the ArchiMate standard
comes in. It lets you create models in
standardized ways, where everybody
understands them in the same way. It lets you analyze your architecture across many
aspects, including identifying complexity bottlenecks, cost issues, and risks from
outdated technology -- or any other kind of analysis you want to make.
Enterprise architecture is the key discipline in this new world of digital transformation and
business agility. Although the discipline has to change to move with the times, it’s still
very important to make sure that your organization is adaptive, can change with the
times, and doesn’t get stuck in an overly complex, legacy world.
Gardner: Of course, Enterprise Architecture is always learning and improving, and so
the ArchiMate standard is advancing, too. So please summarize for me the
improvements in the new release of ArchiMate, version 3.1.
Find Out More About
The Open Group ArchiMate Forum
Lankhorst: The most obvious new addition to the standard is the concept of a value
stream, that’s the latest new concept or new standard. That’s inspired by business
architecture, and those of you who follow things like TOGAF®, a standard of The Open
Group, or the BIZBOK will know this that value streams are a key concept in there, next
to things like capabilities. ArchiMate didn’t yet have a value stream concept. Now it does,
and it plays the same role as the value stream does for the TOGAF framework.
It lets you express how a company produces its value and what the stages in the value
production are. So that helps describe how an organization realizes its business
outcomes. That’s the most visible addition.
ArchiMate lets you analyze your
architecture across many aspects,
including identifying complexity
bottlenecks, cost issues, and risks
from outdated technology.

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Next to that, there are some other changes, minor things, such as you can have a
directed association relationship instead of only an undirected one. That can come in
very handy in all kinds of modeling situations. And there are some technical
improvements to various definitions; they have been clarified. The specification of the
metamodel has been improved.
One technical improvement specifically of interest to ArchiMate specialists is the way in
which we deal with so-called derived relationships. A derived relationship is basically the
conclusion you can draw from a whole chain of things connected together. You might
want to see what’s actually the end-to-end connection between things on that chain so
there are rules on that. We have changed, improved, and formalized these rules. That
allows, at a technical level, some extra capabilities in the language.
And that’s really for the specialists. I would say the first two things, the value stream
concept and this directed association -- those are the most visible for most end users.
Overall value of the value stream
Gardner: It’s important to understand how value streams now are being applied
holistically. We have seen them, of course, in the frameworks -- and now with ArchiMate.
Value streams provide a common denominator for organizations to interpret and then
act. That often cuts across different business units. Help us understand why value
streams as a common denominator are so powerful.
Lankhorst: Value stream helps express the
value that an organization produces for its
stakeholders, the outcomes it produces, and the
different stages needed to produce that value. It
provides a concept that’s less detailed than
looking at your individual business processes.
If you look at the process level, you might be standing too closely in front of the picture.
You don’t see the overall perspective of how a company creates value for its customers.
You only see the individual tasks that you perform, but how that actually adds value for
your stakeholders -- that’s really the key.
The capability concept and the mapping between them is also very important. That
allows you see what capabilities are needed for the stages in the value production. And
in that way, you have a great starting point for the rest of the development of your
architecture. It tells you what you need to be able to do in order to add value in these
different stages.
You can use that at a relatively high level, an economic perspective, where you look at
classical value chains from, say, a supplier via internal production to marketing and
sales and to the consumer. You can also use that at a fine-grade level. But the focus is
really always about the value you create -- rather than the tasks you perform.
Value stream provides a
concept that’s less detailed
than looking at your individual
business processes.

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Gardner: For those who might not be familiar with ArchiMate, can you provide us with a
brief history? It was first used in The Netherlands in 2004 and it’s been part of The Open
Group since 2008. How far back is your connection with ArchiMate?
Lankhorst: Yes, it started as a research and development project in The Netherlands.
At that time, I worked at an applied research institute in IT. We did joint collaborative
projects with industry and academia. In the case of ArchiMate, there was a project in
which we had, for example, a large bank and a pension fund and the Dutch tax
administration. A number of these large organizations needed a common way of
describing architectures.
That began in 2002. I was the project manager of that project until 2004. Already during
the projects the participating companies said, “We need this. We need a description
technique for architecture. We also want you to make this a standard.” And we promised
to make it into a standard. We needed a separate organization for that.
So we were in touch with The Open Group in 2004 to 2005. It took a while, but
eventually The Open Group adopted the standard, and the official version under the
aegis of The Open Group came out in 2008, version 1. We had a number of iterations: in
2012, version 2.0, and in 2016, version 3.0. Now, we are at version 3.1.
Download the
ArchiMate Specification 3.1
Gardner: The vision for ArchiMate is to be a de facto modeling notation standard for
Enterprise Architecture that helps improve communication between different
stakeholders across an organization, a company, or even a country or a public agency.
How do the new ArchiMate improvements help advance this vision, in your opinion?
Lankhorst: The value streams concept gives a broader perspective of how value is
produced -- even across an ecosystem of organizations. That’s broader than just a
single company or a single government agency. This broad perspective is important. Of
course it works internally for organizations, it has worked like that, but increasingly we
see this broader perspective.
Just to name two examples of that. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in its
most recent NATO Architecture Framework version 4 came out early last year, now
specify ArchiMate as one of the two allowed metamodels for specifically modeling
architecture for NATO.
For these different countries and how they work together, this is one of the allowed
standards. For example, the British Ministry of Defence wants to use ArchiMate models
and the ArchiMate Exchange format to communicate with industry. For example, when
seek a request for proposal (RFP), they use ArchiMate models for describing the context
of that and then require industry to provide ArchiMate models to describe their solution.

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Another example is in the European System of Central Banks. They have joint systems
for doing transactions between central banks. They have completely modeled those out
in ArchiMate. So, all of these different central banks have the same understanding of the
architecture, across, between, and within organizations. Even within organizations you
can have the same problems of understanding what’s actually happening, how the bits fit
together, and make sure everybody is on the same page.
A manifesto to control complexity
Gardner: It’s very impressive, the extent to which ArchiMate is now being used and
applied. One of the things that’s also been impressive is that the goal of ArchiMate to
corral complexity hasn’t fallen into the trap of becoming too complex itself. One of its
goals was to remain as small as possible, not to cover every single scenario.
How do you manage not to become too complex? How has that worked for ArchiMate?
Lankhorst: One of the key principles behind the language is that we want to keep it as
small and simple as possible. When we drew up our own ArchiMate manifesto -- some
might know of the Agile manifesto – and the ArchiMate manifesto is somewhat similar.
One of the key principles is that we want to cover 80 percent of cases for the 80 percent
of the common users, rather than try to cover a 100 percent for a 100 percent of the
users. That would give you exotic use cases that require very specific features in the
language that hardly anybody uses. It can clutter the picture for all the users. It would be
much more complicated.
So, we have been vigilant to avoid that feature-
creep, where we keep adding and adding all
sorts of things to the language. We want to keep
it as simple as possible. Of course, if you are in a
complex world, you can’t always keep it
completely straightforward. You have to be able
to address that complexity. But keeping the language as easy to use and as easy to
understand as possible has and will remain the goal.
Gardner: The Open Group has been adamant about having executable standards as a
key principle, not too abstract but highly applicable. How is the ArchiMate standard
supporting this principle of being executable and applicable?
Find Out More About
The Open Group ArchiMate Forum
Lankhorst: In two major ways. First, because it is implemented by most major
architecture tools in the market. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the EA
We are vigilant to avoid that
feature-creep, where we keep
adding and adding all sorts of
things to the language.

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tools in there, pretty much all of them have an implementation of the ArchiMate
language. It is just the standard for EA.
In that sense, it becomes the one standard that rules them all in the architecture field. At
a more detailed level, the executable standards, the ArchiMate Exchange format has
played an important role. It makes it possible to exchange models between different
tools for different applications. I mentioned the example of the UK Ministry of Defence
which wants to exchange models with industry, specify their requirements, and get back
specifications and solutions using ArchiMate models. It’s really important to make these
kinds of models and this kind of information available in ways that the different tools can
use, manipulate, and analyze.
Gardner: That’s ArchiMate 3.1. When did that become available?
Lankhorst: The first week of November 2019.
Download the
ArchiMate Specification 3.1
Gardner: What are the next steps? What does the future hold? Where do you take
ArchiMate next?
Lankhorst: We haven’t made any concrete plans yet for possible improvements. But
some things you can think about is simplifying the language further so that it is even
easier to use, perhaps having a simplified notation for certain use cases so you don’t
need the precision of the current notation. Maybe having an alternative notation that
looks easier to the eye.
There are some other things that we might want to look at. For example, ArchiMate
currently assumes that you already have a fair idea about what kind of solution you are
developing. But maybe it’s moving an upstream to the brainstorming phase of
architecture. So supporting the initial stages of design. That might be something we want
to look into.
There are various potential directions
but it’s our aim to keep things simple
and help architects express what
they want to do -- but not make the
language overly complicated and
more difficult to learn.
So simplicity, communication, and maybe expanding a bit toward early-stage design.
Those are the ideas that I currently have. Of course, there is a community, the
ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group. All of the members have a say. There are
other outside influences as well, with various ideas of where we could take this.
It’s our aim to keep things simple and help
architects express what they want to do –
but not make the language overly
complicated and more difficult to learn.

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Gardner: It’s also important to note that the certification program around ArchiMate is
very active. How can people learn more about certification in ArchiMate?
Certification basics
Lankhorst: You can find more details on
The Open Group website, it’s all laid out
there. Basically, there are two levels of
certification and you can take the exams for
that. You can take courses with various
course providers, BiZZdesign being one of
them, and then prepare for the exam.
Increasingly, I see in practice of this is the requirements when architects are hired, that
they are certified so that the company that hires, say consultants, knows that at least
they know the basics. So, I would certainly recommend taking an exam if you are into
Enterprise Architecture.
Gardner: And of course there are also the events around the world. These topics come
up and are often very uniformly and extensively dealt with at The Open Group events, so
people should look for those at the website as well.
I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how the latest update to the ArchiMate standard helps
Enterprise Architects make complex organizations more agile and productive.
Please join me in thanking our guest, Marc Lankhorst, Managing Consultant and Chief
Technology Evangelist at BiZZdesign in The Netherlands. Thank you so much, Marc.
Lankhorst: You’re welcome.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect
agile business innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect discussions sponsored by
The Open Group.
Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your IT community, and do come
back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open
Group.
Transcript of a discussion on how companies and governments can better produce rapid
innovation and manage complexity across their IT and business operations. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
You can take courses with
various course providers,
BiZZdesign being one of them,
and then prepare for the exam.

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