Ever since it was developed as a universal language for enterprise architecture, ArchiMate has had a small but growing fan group in the architecture community, mostly in the Netherlands. That, however, is changing fast. ArchiMate has been accepted as a standard by The Open Group (of the TOGAF framework), which established the ArchiMate Forum to lead its further development. ArchiMate clearly fills a need in the emerging enterprise architecture profession.
This need is becoming apparent especially in the public sector. Governments are faced with demands from the public to work more efficient and to cut back on bureaucracy. As a result, the enterprise architecture of many public organisations is undergoing substantial change. At the same time, public organisations are increasingly aware of the need to standardise the exchange of architecture descriptions, for three reasons:
- To be able to create a common understanding between collaborating government bodies;
- To avoid dependency of a proprietary architecture language and framework;
- To facilitate external audit of a public organisation's architecture artefacts.
Already many public organisations in countries such as Finland and The Netherlands have adopted ArchiMate as their standard architecture language. Public organisations in other countries are considering following that lead.
IDS Scheer has been supporting the ArchiMate initiative since 2006 and launched its first ArchiMate product in 2007. With ARIS 7.1, ArchiMate has been fully integrated into the ARIS method. This enables organisations to combine high level ArchiMate enterprise architectures with numerous "domain methods" such as UML, BPMN, EPC, ERM, BSC and many others.
I believe that in the next few years we will see broad adoption of ArchiMate in a growing number of European countries, especially within the Public and Finance sectors. ArchiMate will mature further as a language as well, and IDS Scheer will play an important role in that process.
I am very interested to learn about your view on ArchiMate and standardisation in the architecture world. If you would like to learn more about ArchiMate or ARIS ArchiMate Modeler, please drop me a line or leave a comment below.
