TOGAF

TOGAF Certification | TOGAF Framework | TOGAF ADM

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The TOGAF 9 Certification for People Program is an industry-accepted and market-driven certification program to support TOGAF 9 standards defined by The Open Group.

Table of Contents

Introduction to TOGAF.

Hello and welcome to the TOGAF® 9 Certification. The TOGAF 9 Certification for People Program is an industry-accepted and market-driven certification program to support TOGAF 9 standards defined by The Open Group.

TOGAF is the de facto global standard for Enterprise Architecture. The aim of this lesson is to provide an introduction to Open Group, Enterprise Architecture and TOGAF as the architecture framework. This lesson provides the management overview of TOGAF 9.1. Management overview provides answers to questions such as:

  • What is Open Group?
  • What is Enterprise Architecture or EA?
  • Why do I need Enterprise Architecture?
  • Why do I need TOGAF as a framework for Enterprise Architecture?

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

  • Provide a management overview of TOGAF, an Open Group Standard
  • Describe the Open Group
  • Discuss the mission of the Architecture Forum
  • Explain the reasons why Enterprise Architecture is required
  • Discuss why a framework is needed
  • Explain the evolution of TOGAF 9.1
  • Describe the TOGAF 9 Certification
  • Summarize the learning outcomes

The Open Group

The Open Group is an international vendor and technology-neutral consortium upon which organizations rely to lead the development of IT standards and certifications, and to provide them with access to key industry peers, suppliers, and best practices. The Open Group provides guidance and an open environment to ensure interoperability and vendor-neutrality.

With more than 425 member organizations and 40,000 member representatives around the globe, The Open Group has a diverse membership that spans all sectors of the IT community, including customers, systems and solutions suppliers, tool vendors, integrators, consultants, academics, and researchers. The Open Group’s membership is open to all enterprises in the world, irrespective of whether they are small, medium, or large.

Vision of the Open Group

The Open Group’s vision is Boundaryless Information Flow™ achieved through global interoperability in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Boundaryless does not mean that there are no boundaries. It indicates that boundaries are permeable to enable businesses.

In the next screen, we will further discuss the vision of The Open Group, emphasizing on Boundaryless Information Flow™.

Boundaryless Information Flow™, a shorthand representation of “access to integrated information to support business process improvements” represents the desired state of an enterprise’s infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the organization.

  • An infrastructure that provides Boundaryless Information Flow™ has open standard components which provide services in a customer’s extended enterprise that:
    combine multiple sources of information and securely deliver the information whenever and wherever it is needed, in the right context for the people or systems using that information.

Boundaryless Information Flow

Achieved through global interoperability in a secure, reliable and timely manner

Boundaryless Information Flow

"Boundaryless does not means there are no boundaries - it means that boundaries are permeable to ebanle business."
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Mission of the Open Group.

The mission of The Open Group is to drive the creation of Boundaryless Information Flow achieve by working with customer to capture, understand and address current and emerging requirement, establish policies and share best practices. working with suppliers, consortia and standards bodies to develop consensus, facilitate interoperability, as well as evolve and integrate specifications and open source technologies offering a comprehensive set of services to enhance the operational efficiency of consortia. developing and operating the industry’s premier certification service and encouraging the procurement of certified products.

Tackling Boundaryless Information Flow.

To tackle the problems related to Boundaryless Information Flow, The Open Group has been working on several subject areas. In the given image, the subject areas have been listed in the first column, such as Enterprise Architecture and cloud computing. For each of the subject areas, The Open Group provides several services as listed in the first row, such as white papers, standards, product and service certification, as well as people and professional certification.

TOGAF is the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture standard. TOGAF certification falls under the professional certification category of the subject area, Enterprise Architecture.
In this book, we will focus on the Enterprise Architecture subject area.

Forums or Work Areas of the Open Group

The Open Group forums and work groups provide members with an open, vendor-neutral environment where they can meet, gain knowledge, and lead the development of IT standards that address the evolving challenges and emerging opportunities of today’s enterprises. Each Open Group forum and work group focuses on the functional areas of work.

The forums and work groups act as meeting points for suppliers and buyers in the following ways:

  • Each forum is effectively an autonomous consortium operating within The Open Group.
  • The direction for each of the workgroups and forums is determined by the members themselves.
  • The outputs of the work groups and forums are approved by members.
  • The forums and work groups must obey some rules to respect anti-trust legislation.
  • The forums initiate new areas of work, often in partnership with other forums. These new areas of work lead to industry standards and certification programs based on those standards.

How Members Work

Mostly, the members of The Open Group work with each other virtually. They interact with each other over email, teleconference, and web conference. The members use the collaboration infrastructure to collaborate their work and deliverables. The activities for projects and forums are tracked according to the schedules and milestones. The key deliverables include the development of standards, professional and technical certifications, process and methodology, and so on.

Quarterly global member meetings are conducted, which acts as the virtual meeting point for all members. Local member meetings are conducted, where local members meet face to face.

Why Customers Join

Customers get the following advantages by joining the forums and workgroups of The Open Group.

  • They can build relationships with peers in industries related to The Open Group, and share knowledge.
  • They can talk to suppliers in a non-selling environment.
  • They can influence the priorities being addressed by the industry.
  • They have early access to the solutions being developed to address urgent issues.
  • They can track forums, work groups, projects, and activities that are relevant to their enterprise.

For example, in the context of IT services, banking firms, manufacturing firms and insurance firms can be termed as customers, and IT consulting firms such as IBM and HP can be termed as suppliers.

Architecture Forum—Mission

The mission of The Open Group Architecture Forum is to advance The Open Group’s vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™, for and between enterprises, through a set of programs that focus on all architectural aspects of this objective. The architectural aspects include:

  • providing broad and deep leadership to the EA community;
  • validating, publishing, fostering, and maintaining best practices for EA;
  • developing, organizing, researching, and publishing thought leaders in EA; and
  • initiating and managing programs and projects to support these activities.

Stakeholders and Values

The members of the Architecture Forum have early access to relevant knowledge, and are able to influence and lead the development of EA standards and best practices. The Forum provides an active, vendor-neutral environment for users and vendors to learn and develop the EA standards aligned with business objectives, and deliver greater value.

The stakeholders and the values they get from the Architecture Forum are as follows:

  1. Customer architects: They get reduced time, cost, and risk.
  2. Tools vendors: They get a bigger market and a bigger market share.
  3. IT solution vendors: They get greater cost-efficiency.
  4. Integrators: They get greater cost-efficiency and better service.
  5. Academic or research organizations: They get funding support.
  6. This concludes the introduction to the Architecture Forum. Next, we will focus on Enterprise Architecture and why it is required.

What is an Enterprise

TOGAF defines ’enterprise‘ as any collection of organizations that have a common set of goals. For example, an enterprise could be a government agency, a part of a corporation or a whole corporation. Other examples of an enterprise are a single department and a chain of geographically distant organizations linked together by common ownership.

Confusion often arises from the evolving nature of the term “enterprise”. An extended enterprise nowadays includes partners, suppliers, and customers. If the goal is to integrate an extended enterprise, then the enterprise comprises the partners, suppliers, customers, and internal business units.

Each organization is an enterprise in itself. For example, the organization you are working for, or your client organization.

What is Architecture

Architecture is the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in:

  • its components;
  • their relationships to each other and the environment; and
  • the principles governing its design and evolution.

When we talk about system architecture, for example, payment system architecture, we define the components of the system, its relationship with each other and the governing principles.

What is Enterprise Architecture

Some definitions of Enterprise Architecture:

  • According to the MIT Centre for Information Systems Research, Enterprise Architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure, reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.
  • According to SearchCIO.com (read as search C-I-O dotcom), Enterprise Architecture is a conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of Enterprise Architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives.

Let us consider the enterprise as a system and discuss their components. Some examples of the components of an enterprise are their departments, executives, business functions, business processes, IT systems, and operating models. Hence, when we discuss Enterprise architecture, we talk about these components of an enterprise, their relationship with each other, and the governing principles. Also, in consideration with current and future objectives, Enterprise Architecture always talk about baseline or current state, and target or future state.

Architecture Types.

There are four architecture types or domains that are commonly accepted as subsets of Enterprise Architecture. TOGAF is designed to support all of these.

  • The Business Architecture defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes.
  • The Data Architecture describes the structure of an organization’s logical and physical data assets, and data management resources.
  • The Application Architecture provides a blueprint for the individual applications to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization.
  • The Technology Architecture describes the logical software and hardware capabilities that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, middleware, networks, communications, processing, standards, and so on.

Why Enterprise Architecture

Effective management and exploitation of information through IT is the key to business success, and is indispensable to achieve competitive advantage. Enterprise Architecture addresses this need by providing a strategic context for the evolution of the IT system in response to the constantly changing needs of the business environment.

The last couple of decades have seen IT boom, and over that period of time, most organizations have developed several systems keeping in mind short-term benefits. This has led to fragmented, duplicate systems that are poorly understood and not responsive to change.

Investment in Information Technology or IT has focused on system maintenance and tactical developments rather than a strategic plan.

In today’s competitive world, enterprises can no longer continue with the situation that prevailed over the last couple of decades. They need effective management of their IT and business resources.
The purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes, both manual and automated, into an integrated environment. This environment should be responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy.

Following are the two key reasons why you need Enterprise Architecture:

  • Enterprise Architecture is critical to business survival and success, and it provides a competitive advantage through IT.
  • Enterprise Architecture enables managed innovation within the enterprise. It helps you to achieve the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation. Individual business units can innovate safely in their pursuit of competitive advantage. At the same time, the needs of the organization for an integrated IT strategy are assured, permitting the closest possible synergy across the extended enterprise.

Business Benefits of Enterprise Architecture

The business benefits of EA are as follows:

It helps an organization achieve its business strategy: Without an understanding of business, applications, and technology architecture, a business does not know how to align and implement IT to execute its business strategy. In essence, it does not know what it has or does not have. However, when planning programs and projects, a business has to ensure that effort is targeted onto those aspects that really matter, and this adds to the strength of the enterprise.

Faster time to market new innovations and capabilities: If IT can introduce new technologies and functionalities faster to key business areas, the organization can respond faster to competitive pressures, and deploy differentiating capabilities faster. These areas are most likely to be identified when the business and IT staff collaborate closely in the Enterprise Architecture development process. The outcome is that technology is ready when it is needed, transitions are smoother, and unnecessary change is minimized.

  • More consistent business processes and flow of information across business units: Enterprise Architecture can unlock the power of information, unifying information silos that inhibit business processes. It identifies the processes, applications, and data that need to be consistent if consistent business decisions are to be taken.
  • More reliability, security, and less risk: Enterprise Architecture provides clear traceability between business processes, data, user roles, applications, and infrastructure. A reliable architecture model aids consistency and manageability. An organization has a much better chance of implementing corporate standards and planning and managing those standards on an ongoing basis.

Some more business benefits of Enterprise Architecture are:

  • a more efficient business operation;
  • a more efficient IT operation;
  • better return on existing investment;
  • reduced risk for future investment; and
  • faster, simpler, and cheaper procurement.

The Importance of Governance

An Enterprise Architecture is only as good as the decision-making framework established around it. This decision-making framework is called governance framework.

An Enterprise Architecture must be supported by a strong governance framework to ensure the successful development, implementation, and sustainment of the architecture.

The governance framework depends on:

  • clear authority structure; and
  • the right participants

The image given below illustrates the organization structure of the TOGAF architecture governance framework. It describes all parties involved and their responsibilities in the governance environment. Generally, the CIO or CTO leads the architecture governance practice, providing stewardship to the teams responsible for developing, implementing, and deploying the Enterprise Architecture.

The box marked as `Develop’ represents the Enterprise Architecture team responsible for developing the Enterprise Architecture. The Enterprise Architecture team comprises the chief architect, enterprise architects and domain architects. Domain architects imply business architects, application architects, data architects, and technical architects. The Architecture Board provides guidance to the architects to develop the Enterprise Architecture.

The Architecture Board acts as the approving and controlling authority for the following:

Consistency between sub-architectures

  • Identifying re-usable components
  • Flexibility of enterprise architecture; to meet business needs and utilize new technologies
  • Enforcement of Architecture Compliance
  • Improving the maturity level of architecture discipline within the organization
  • Ensuring that the discipline of architecture-based development is adopted
  • Providing the basis for all decision-making with regard to changes to the architectures, and
  • Supporting a visible escalation capability for out-of-bounds decisions

The box marked as `Implement` is the Enterprise Architecture team responsible for implementing the Enterprise Architecture. It comprises the Project Management Office or PMO and implementation project teams. The Architecture Board provides implementation related guidance to the PMO. Several implementation projects can arise from one Enterprise Architecture project. The PMO manages all these implementation projects. The implementation projects have to conform to the Enterprise Architecture proposed by the enterprise architects.

The box marked as `Deploy` is the Enterprise Architecture team responsible for deploying and monitoring the Enterprise Architecture. Each of the implementation projects produces one or more solutions that are operational systems to be deployed in production environment. The service management team deploys and monitors the operational systems.

The Enterprise Continuum is the logical view of the Architecture Repository that provides methods for classifying architecture and solution artefacts as they evolve from generic foundation architectures to organization-specific architectures. The architectural models, solutions, processes, regulatory requirements, authority structures, organizational standards, Service Level Agreements or SLAs, and Operational Level Agreements or OLAs are stored and retrieved from the Enterprise Continuum.

What Governance Means

Governance provides rules and procedures or ways for making architectural decisions.

Under the governance structure, it is clearly authorized who should be involved, who are responsible and who are accountable in the decision-making process.

What is an Architecture Framework?

According to Definition 3.13 of TOGAF, architecture framework is a conceptual structure used to develop, implement, and sustain Enterprise Architecture.

An architecture framework is a foundational structure, or a set of structures, which can be used for developing a broad range of different architectures. It should describe a method for designing the target state of the enterprise in terms of a set of building blocks, and for showing how the building blocks fit together. An architecture framework should contain a set of tools and provide a common vocabulary. It should also include a list of recommended standards and compliant products that can be used to implement the building blocks.

The Value of a Framework

Using an architecture framework provides the following values:

  • It provides a practical starting point for an architecture project.
  • It helps avoid the initial panic when the scale of the task becomes apparent.
  • It ensures that systematic, ‘codified common sense’ prevails when different architectures are developed using the framework.
  • It captures what others have found to work in real life.
  • It contains a baseline set of resources for reuse.

Enterprise Architecture Development Method

Architecture framework provides an Enterprise Architecture development method. The image illustrates TOGAF’s Enterprise Architecture Development Method.

TOGAF provides a comprehensive general method for Enterprise Architecture development, implementation, and sustainment.

TOGAF is a vendor, tool, and technology-neutral open standard.

One of the key aims of TOGAF is to avoid reinventing the wheel, encouraging re-use as much as possible. The main goal is to enable business and IT alignment.

TOGAF is based on the best practices followed by industries.

Any organization can become a part of The Open Group Architecture Forum and participate in the evolution of the framework.

TOGAF is available under a free perpetual license. The Open Group provides TOGAF free of charge to organizations for their own internal non-commercial purposes.

TOGAF can be tailored to meet the needs of an organization and the industry.

TOGAF is an architecture framework that is widely adopted in the market. It is being used by companies in all domains such as finance, banking, manufacturing, insurance, and healthcare.

TOGAF is complimentary to other frameworks and does not compete with them. TOGAF can work with several frameworks such as PMP, PRINCE2®, Zachman, ITIL, and COBIT. There are white papers available on The Open Group publication section for this. If you have the requirement to make TOGAF work with other frameworks, please visit The Open Group publication section for details.

This concludes the introduction to architecture framework. Next, the background and core concepts of TOGAF are discussed.

TOGAF Scope

TOGAF emphasizes business goals as architecture drivers, and provides a repository of best practices, which includes the following:

  • TOGAF Architecture Development Method or ADM: The TOGAF Architecture Development Method provides a tested and repeatable process for developing architectures.
  • ADM Guidelines and Techniques: This provides a collection of guidelines and techniques available for use in applying TOGAF and the TOGAF ADM.
  • TOGAF Architecture Content Framework: The content framework provides a structural model for architectural content that allows the major work products that an architect creates to be consistently defined, structured, and presented.
  • Enterprise Continuum: The Enterprise Continuum provides a view of the Architecture Repository that shows the evolution of these related architectures from generic to specific, abstract to concrete, and logical to physical.
  • TOGAF Reference Models: A reference model is an abstract framework for understanding significant relationships among the entities of an environment, and for developing consistent standards or specifications supporting that environment.
  • TOGAF Capability Framework: The TOGAF Architecture Capability Framework provides a set of reference materials on how to establish an architecture function.
    These are the core concepts of TOGAF, which will be explored in further lessons.

TOGAF Goals

Following are the long-term goals of TOGAF:

  • TOGAF intends to be an industry-standard, generic Enterprise Architecture method, usable on its own or in conjunction with frameworks having products relevant or specific to particular sectors.
  • Several frameworks such as Zachman, Spewak, DoD (read as D-o-D) Framework, FEAF, and TEAF have mind share.
  • Most of the other frameworks focus mainly on products and not methods.
  • TOGAF is meant to work with other frameworks. It is not meant to replace other frameworks being used in enterprises.

TOGAF version 9 is an evolution from TOGAF 8.1.1. It closely aligns with the business. It has been restructured for easy use. It is an overall structure and the core method for Enterprise Architecture.

TOGAF 9 Components

The image shows the core components of TOGAF.

TOGAF Architecture Development Method or ADM:

The ADM is the core of TOGAF. It is a step-by-step approach to develop and use Enterprise Architecture. The TOGAF ADM provides a tested and repeatable process for developing architectures. The ADM includes establishing an architecture framework, developing architecture content, transitioning, and governing the realization of architectures.

ADM Guidelines and Techniques:

This provides a collection of guidelines and techniques available for use in applying TOGAF and the TOGAF ADM. Guidelines provides direction on how ADM can be used in practice under different scenarios, for example applying iterations and partitions to the architecture. Techniques provide details on how specific tasks of ADM phases can be done, for example stakeholder management and business scenario.

TOGAF Architecture Content Framework

The content framework provides a structural model for architectural content that allows the major work products that an architect creates to be consistently defined, structured, and presented. The content framework provided here is intended to allow TOGAF to be used as a stand-alone framework for architecture within an enterprise. However, other content frameworks exist (such as the Zachman Framework) and it is anticipated that some enterprises may opt to use an external framework in conjunction with TOGAF. In these cases, the content framework provides a useful reference and starting point for TOGAF content to be mapped to other frameworks.

Enterprise Continuum

The Enterprise Continuum provides a view of the Architecture Repository that shows the evolution of these related architectures from generic to specific, from abstract to concrete, and from logical to physical. It describes how architectures can be partitioned and organized within a repository. It also describes tools for architecture development. It has two constituents – Architecture Continuum and Solutions Continuum.

TOGAF Reference Models

A reference model is based on a small number of unifying concepts and may be used as a basis for education and explaining standards to a non-specialist. A reference model is not directly tied to any standards, technologies, or other concrete implementation details, but it does seek to provide common semantics that can be used unambiguously across and between different implementations.

TOGAF Capability Framework

Architecture capability is the ability of an organization to perform Enterprise Architecture practices. Architecture Capability Framework provides a set of reference materials for how to establish such an architecture function.