The Benefits of Enterprise Architecture Methodologies

hi

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/integration/the-benefits-of-enterprise-architecture-methodologies.html

Friday, I wrote about TOGAF, an open standard for starting and running an enterprise architecture (EA). I’ve written about it several times, and I realized that if you’re not familiar with EA methodologies, you might think that’s the only one.

It is not. Although TOGAF is popular and perhaps more discussed than most EA frameworks, it’s actually one of 20 or 21 EA frameworks — depending on how you count SAP’s EA Framework, which extends TOGAF with more support for service-oriented architecture and off-the-shelf software.

There are several well-known standards. For instance, the Zachman Frameworkoriginated at IBM during the 1980s and is still very popular. TOGAF even offers a map to the Zachman Framework, as a way of translating to those who are more familiar with how Zachman works.

ArchiMate is another standard you’ll hear about it, but it’s more of a modeling language for enterprise architecture than a framework. It’s an open and vendor-independent standard that came out of the Netherlands more than a decade ago. ArchiMate has since been transferred to The Open Group.

IBM, SAP, the UK Ministry of Defense, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Federal Enterprise Architecture, Capgemini, the DOD and other analysts and government groups also claim their versions of enterprise architecture. You can see a more complete list, with descriptions and links, at the end of Wikipedia’s entry on TOGAF.

Okay, it’s great that there are lots of choices for an EA framework or m