Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Joining us is Marc Lankhorst, Managing
Consultant and Chief Technology Evangelist at BiZZdesign
in The Netherlands. He also leads the development team within the ArchiMate Forum at The Open Group. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Here are some excerpts:
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 |
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 design where
you want to go by making something that is easier to change from your current
state.
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.
Stay flexible, move with the times
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The
value
streams concept gives a broader perspective of how value is produced --
even across an ecosystem of organizations. This broad perspective is
important.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.
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