In most organizations, every business and technical domain speaks its own language, draws its own models, and uses its own techniques and tools. Communication and decision making across domains, necessary for business change, is thus seriously impaired.

Just like an architectural drawing in classical building architecture describes the various aspects of the construction and use of a building, 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 stakeholders to design, assess, and communicate the consequences of decisions and changes within and between these business domains.

ArchiMate: integrated architecture modeling

The core of ArchiMate is a design language to model business and IT architectures in coherence with each other. Next to the design language, ArchiMate offers a range of techniques for visualizing, analyzing, designing, and using enterprise architecture to solve business change. ArchiMate provides the enterprise architect with architectural instruments for supporting and improving the business change process. These instruments help the architect in communicating with all stakeholders involved, ranging from managers to software developers.

ArchiMate avoids ambiguity and confusion by offering a simple and uniform language for describing enterprise architecture. ArchiMate distinguishes three layers of modeling: ArchiMate distinguishes three layers of modeling: the business layer (business processes, organization, business functions, products, and business services), the application layer (applications, application services, application functions, application interfaces), and the technology layer (nodes, networks, infrastructural services, software). ArchiMate describes each architectural layer in terms of its structure elements (e.g., business actors, application components), their behavior (e.g., business processes, application functions), and the (information) objects they use and produce (e.g., product, data object). Services play a central role in the relationship between domains. Services are provided by organizations to their customers, by applications to business processes, or by technological facilities to applications.

Support for ArchiMate

BiZZdesign provides several training courses on ArchiMate, including certification for ArchiMate via The Open Group.

The tool BiZZdesign Architect is an easy to use and powerful tool for enterprise architecture, based on the ArchiMate language, and certified by The Open Group as ArchiMate-supporting tool.

Introduction ArchiMate

In the clip under here Remco Blom explains the de basics of ArchiMate: