ArchiMate


ArchiMate is an open and independent enterprise architecture modeling language to support the description, analysis and visualization of architecture within and across business domains in an unambiguous way.
ArchiMate is a technical standard from The Open Group and is based on concepts from the now superseded IEEE 1471 standard. It is supported by various tool vendors and consulting firms. ArchiMate is also a registered trademark of The Open Group.
The Open Group has a certification program for ArchiMate users, software tools and courses.
ArchiMate distinguishes itself from other languages such as Unified Modeling Language and Business Process Modeling and Notation by its enterprise modelling scope.
Also, UML and BPMN are meant for a specific use and they are quite heavy – containing about 150 and 250 modeling concepts whereas ArchiMate works with just about 50. The goal of ArchiMate is to be ”as small as possible”, not to cover every edge scenario imaginable. To be easy to learn and apply, ArchiMate was intentionally restricted “to the concepts that suffice for modeling the proverbial 80% of practical cases".

Overview

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 main concepts and relationships of the ArchiMate language can be seen as a framework, the so-called Archimate Framework: It divides the enterprise architecture into a business, application and technology layer. In each layer, three aspects are considered: active elements, an internal structure and elements that define use or communicate information.
One of the objectives of the ArchiMate language is to define the relationships between concepts in different architecture domains. The concepts of this language therefore hold the middle between the detailed concepts, which are used for modeling individual domains, and Business Process Model and Notation, which is used for business process modeling.

History

ArchiMate is partly based on the now superseded IEEE 1471 standard. It was developed in the Netherlands by a project team from the Telematica Instituut in cooperation with several Dutch partners from government, industry and academia. Among the partners were, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Later, tests were performed in organizations such as ABN AMRO, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration and the ABP.
The development process lasted from July 2002 to December 2004, and took about 35 person years and approximately 4 million euros. The development was funded by the Dutch government, and business partners, including ABN AMRO and the ABP Pension Fund.
In 2008 the ownership and stewardship of ArchiMate was transferred to The Open Group. It is now managed by the
ArchiMate Forum within The Open Group.
In February 2009 The Open Group published the ArchiMate 1.0 standard as a formal technical standard. In January 2012 the ArchiMate 2.0 standard, and in 2013 the ArchiMate 2.1 standard was released.
In June 2016, the Open Group released version 3.0 of the ArchiMate Specification. An update to Archimate 3.0.1 came out in August 2017. Archimate 3.1 was published 5 November 2019. The latest version of the ArchiMate Specification is version 3.2 released October 2022.
Version 3.0 adds enhanced support for capability-oriented strategic modelling, new entities representing physical resources and a generic metamodel showing the entity types and the relationships between them.

ArchiMate framework

Core framework

The main concepts and elements of the ArchiMate language are being presented as ArchiMate core framework. It consists of three layers and three aspects. This creates a matrix of combinations. Every layer has its passive structure, behavior and active structure aspects.

Layers

ArchiMate has a layered and service-oriented look on architectural models. The higher layers make use of services that are provided by the lower layers. Although, at an abstract level, the concepts that are used within each layer are similar, we define more concrete concepts that are specific for a certain layer. In this context, we distinguish three main layers:
  • The business layer is about business processes, services, functions and events of business units. This layer "offers products and services to external customers, which are realized in the organization by business processes performed by business actors and roles".
  • The application layer is about software applications that "support the components in the business with application services".
  • The technology layer deals "with the hardware and communication infrastructure to support the application layer. This layer offers infrastructural services needed to run applications, realized by computer and communication hardware and system software".
Each of these main layers can be further divided in sub-layers. For example, in the business layer, the primary business processes realising the products of a company may make use of a layer of secondary business processes; in the application layer, the end-user applications may make use of generic services offered by supporting applications. On top of the business layer, a separate environment layer may be added, modelling the external customers that make use of the services of the organisation.
In line with service orientation, the most important relation between layers is formed by use relations, which show how the higher layers make use of the services of lower layers. However, a second type of link is formed by realisation relations: elements in lower layers may realise comparable elements in higher layers; e.g., a ‘data object’ may realise a ‘business object’ ; or an ‘artifact’ may realise either a ‘data object’ or an ‘application component’.

Aspects

  • Passive structure is the set of entities on which actions are conducted. In the business layer the example would be information objects, in the application layer data objects and in the technology layer, they could include physical objects.
  • Behavior refers to the processes and functions performed by the actors. "Structural elements are assigned to behavioral elements, to show who or what displays the behavior".
  • Active structure is the set of entities that display some behavior, e.g. business actors, devices, or application components.

    Full framework

The Full ArchiMate framework is enriched by the physical layer, which was added to allow modeling of “physical equipment, materials, and distribution networks” and was not present in the previous version.
The implementation and migration layer adds elements that allow architects to model a state of transition, to mark parts of the architecture that are temporary for the purpose, as the name says, of implementation and migration.
Strategy layer adds three elements: resource, capability and course of action. These elements help to incorporate strategic dimension to the ArchiMate language by allowing it to depict the usage of resources and capabilities in order to achieve some strategic goals.
Finally, there is a motivation aspect that allows different stakeholders to describe the motivation of specific actors or domains, which can be quite important when looking at one thing from several different angles. It adds several elements like stakeholder, value, driver, goal, meaning etc.

ArchiMate language

The ArchiMate language is formed as a top-level and is hierarchical. On the top, there is a model. A model is a collection of concepts. A concept can be either an element or a relationship. An element can be either of behavior type, structure, motivation or a so-called composite element.
The functionality of all concepts without a dependency on a specific layer is described by the generic metamodel. This layer-independent description of concepts is useful when trying to understand the mechanics of the Archimate language.

Concepts

Elements

The generic elements are distributed into the same categories as the layers:
  • Active structure elements
  • Behavior elements
  • Passive structure elements
  • Motivation elements
Active structure elements represent entities that are capable of performing behavior. Based on two levels of abstraction that ArchiMate provides, it is possible to distinguish between internal active structure elements, which stand for active elements within the system - e. g., business actors - and external active structure elements which stand for elements that carry out the behavior outside the system - e. g., interfaces.
Behavior elements can be internal or external as well. An internal behavior element is one that stands for an activity carried out by an active structure element within the system. Archimate defines for instance process and function elements. External behavior is a service that the whole system provides to the environment.
Passive structure elements are objects that can be used by behavior elements. They usually stand for information objects in the business layer and data objects in the application layer, but they may also be used to represent physical objects.
As described in the previous chapter, motivation elements are answering the question Why?, they are trying to give a context and explain the motives behind the architecture. They can be of an active structure, as a stakeholder and also of a passive structure - value, meaning, driver, etc.