ArchiMate
The Open Group has a certification program for ArchiMate users, software tools and courses.
To be easy to learn and apply, ArchiMate was intentionally restricted “to the concepts that suffice for modeling the proverbial 80% of practical cases".
[4] 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.
One of the objectives of the ArchiMate language is to define the relationships between concepts in different architecture domains.
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 Ordina [nl], Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).
Later, tests were performed in organizations such as ABN AMRO, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration and the ABP.
[7] The development process lasted from July 2002 to December 2004, and took about 35 person years and approximately 4 million euros.
[16] Version 3.0 adds[17] enhanced support for capability-oriented strategic modelling, new entities representing physical resources (for modelling the ingredients, equipment and transport resources used in the physical world) and a generic metamodel showing the entity types and the relationships between them.
Strategy layer adds three elements: resource, capability and course of action.
The functionality of all concepts without a dependency on a specific layer is described by the generic metamodel.
The classification of relationships[21] is following: The general structure of models within the different layers is similar.
The service concept represents a unit of essential functionality that a system exposes to its environment.
Services are accessible through interfaces, which constitute the external view on the structural aspect.
For this realisation, it is necessary to make a distinction between behavior that is performed by an individual structural element (e.g., actor, role component, etc.
), or collective behavior (interaction) that is performed by a collaboration of multiple structural elements.
The ArchiMate language separates the concepts from their notation (contrary to the UML or BPMN).
Although ArchiMate doesn't stress the only one notation, it comes with one and it aims to those "used to existing technical modeling techniques such as ERD, UML, or BPMN, and therefore resembles them".
Also by reducing the “view” by setting the right conditions and intentionally limiting the perspective, it is easier solve specific problems and also, for stakeholders from specific areas it makes the model easier to read.
