The ArchiMate® 3.2 Specification, a standard of The Open Group

The basics

The ArchiMate Specification defines an open and independent modeling language for Enterprise Architecture that is supported by different tool vendors and consulting firms. The ArchiMate language enables enterprise architects to describe, analyze,

and visualize the relationships between business domains in an unambiguous way.

Summary

Developed by the members of The Open Group, the ArchiMate®

1.2  Specification was released in October 2022 and is aligned with the TOGAF® Standard, the world’s most popular Enterprise Architecture framework. As a result, enterprise architects

using the language can improve the way key business and IT stakeholders collaborate and adapt to change.

 

The standard contains the formal definition of the ArchiMate notation as a visual design language, together with concepts for specifying interrelated architectures, and specific viewpoints for typical stakeholders. The standard also includes a chapter addressing considerations regarding language extensions.

The contents of the standard include the following:

•   The introduction, including the objectives, overview, conformance requirements, and terminology

•   Definitions of the general terms used in the specification

•   The structure of the modeling language

•   The generic metamodel of the language

•   The relationships in the language

•   A detailed breakdown of the modeling framework covering the motivation elements, strategy layer elements, and the three core layers (Business/Application/Technology)

•   Relationships between core layers

•   Implementation and migration layer elements

•   The concepts of stakeholders, architecture viewpoints, and views, as well as the ArchiMate viewpoint mechanism

•   Mechanisms for customizing the language

•   Notation overviews and summaries

 

The ArchiMate modeling language improves collaboration by enabling clearer understanding across multiple functions, including business executives, enterprise architects, systems

analysts, software engineers, business process consultants, and infrastructure engineers. The standard enables the creation

of fully integrated models of an organization’s Enterprise Architecture, the motivation behind it, and the programs, projects, and migration paths to implement it. The language uses the terminology defined in the TOGAF framework, and supports modeling throughout the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) cycle.

Target audience

Enterprise architects, business architects, IT architects, application architects, data architects, software architects, systems architects, solutions architects, infrastructure architects, process architects, domain architects, product managers, operational managers, senior managers, project leaders, and anyone committed to working within the reference framework defined by an Enterprise Architecture.

Scope and constraints

The role of the ArchiMate standard is to provide a graphical language for the representation of Enterprise Architectures over time (i.e., including transformation and migration planning),

as well as their motivation and rationale. The ArchiMate modeling language provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures, and offers an integrated approach to describe and visualize the different architecture domains, together with their underlying relations and dependencies.

 

The design of the ArchiMate language started from a set of relatively generic concepts (objects and relations), which have been specialized for application at the different architectural layers for an Enterprise Architecture. The most important design restriction on the language is that it has been explicitly designed to be as compact as possible, yet still usable for most Enterprise Architecture modeling tasks. In the interest of simplicity of learning and use, the ArchiMate language has been limited to the concepts that suffice for modeling the proverbial 80% of practical cases.