I am really happy to share with you the great news: IDS Scheer has joined recently The Open Group! You may wonder (if you are a bit outside Enterprise Architecture community) what this group is? Well, The Open Group (TOG) is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium, whose vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ will enable access to integrated information, within and among enterprises, based on open standards and global interoperability (that is what they say about themselves :-) )...
At beginning of June we have been granted membership entitlements and benefits and now participate in the Architecture Forum of The Open Group. This forum is just one of many. Other forums are working on topics you may perhaps heard about like WAP (e.g. you can browse certain web sites right from your cell) or CORBA (that is for programmers) or UNIX (and that is for old grey-haired gurus somewhere in depths of data centres of your company :-)).
Well, we are going to participate in the Architecture Forum, which has developed and is evolving a comprehensive enterprise architecture framework (TOGAF – The Open Group Architecture Framework) to enable businesses to achieve the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation, while also taking into consideration the constantly changing needs of the business environment. TOGAF was developed and continuously evolved since the mid-90’s by representatives of the world’s leading IT customer and vendor organizations, working in The Open Group's Architecture Forum.
Why did we decide to participate in this very forum and why do we need it? In fact, TOGAF is now a widespread industry standard architecture framework, especially in English speaking countries like UK, US, South Africa, Australia and almost-whole-population-speaking-English countries like Sweden, Finland, Denmark. Another reason was the fact that TOGAF may be used freely by any organization wishing to develop enterprise architecture for use within organizations. Large consulting companies have developed their own methods as well (like Cap Gemini's IAF), but they cannot be freely used and therefore are less popular (if known at all in some parts of the world).
Another good reason for joining The Open Group is the fact that recently Telematica Institute, which was looking after Archimate framework, very popular in The Netherlands and getting more popularity in neighbour countries, gave all the rights for Archimate to The Open Group and a new Archimate Forum was established there. Our colleagues from IDS Scheer Netherlands participate in Telematica activities for ages and now will be happy to work on further improvement of this emerging framework within TOG. Besides the membership we are also looking for TOGAF 8 certification of ARIS Platform in the very near future. Stay tuned and do not miss the moment when ARIS gets the logo "TOGAF Certified Tool"!
