1. Overview of Core Concepts
And in the following sections, we’re going to review the core concepts of the togaf standard. The requirements of the part one exam actually says that one of those things you need to know is the core concepts of togaf nine standard. So in the videos that follow, we’re going to review the seven core concepts one by one. Those seven concepts are the definition of Enterprise, the Architecture domains, which is abbreviated as bdat, the Architecture Development Method, which is abbreviated as adm, those deliverables artifacts and building blocks, which are the outputs of our architectural work.
The Enterprise continuum, which is the categorization method of our architectural work along a continuum, the architectural repository which is where that work is stored. And and finally, togaf is a lot about defining and establishing your architecture capability, and that’s a core concept of togaf as well. So coming up in the next set of videos, we’re going to go through these one by one, so stay tuned for that.
2. Definition of Enterprise
Enterprise to boldly go where? No. Oh, wait. No. We’re not talking about that type of enterprise. In a general sense, an enterprise is the highest level of description of an organization. You can pretty much define it as you wish. So it might be the legal entity. It might be a tight connection of related businesses that operate together. For instance, if you’re you’re an enterprise architect for the Us. Federal government, the entire government of 2. 8 million employees is probably not your definition of enterprise. But depending on where you work, your branch of the government might be.
Essentially, there is one defined group of people at the top who can set the direction for the way the business runs. These are the executives. These are the board of directors. Unfortunately, the definition of enterprise is pretty fluid. It’s however you want it to be. Another example is you might work in an enterprise that has a lot of very close partners. These could be contractors that work within your organization, or these could be partners that work for an outside firm that are across the street or in the same building as you or in the same city.
So, I did some work for McDonald’s several years ago, and McDonald’s has tightpartnership with some of its suppliers. And those suppliers often open offices in the same cities that McDonald’s has offices in around the world, and they work exclusively with them. So one could argue that at least some of the way those partners operate are part of the McDonald’s business process. And if McDonald’s wanted to change the process, their partners would change the process. So that’s just one example of a collection of organization operating together.
So, an enterprise is the top level of the business. That’s where everything operates below it or interconnected in some way. It may be one organization. It may be multiple organizations, but that’s the general definition of enterprise. Now, when we’re talking about enterprise architecture, we also have to take into context this concept of scope, the scope of your work as an architect. Now, maybe you are responsible for the architecture of the entire enterprise. It’s possible. Or maybe your scope is different.
Maybe you only need to worry about a certain large business unit within the enterprise. Now, I don’t mean to cause confusion here, but as you know, if you’re clear about certain business units being in scope and certain ones being out of scope, it will make your job a lot easier. So maybe you only work with the consumer product side of your business, and the manufacturing side operates like it’s a whole other business to you. So that is the definition of enterprise. And enterprise architecture a scoping exercise.
3. The Four Architecture Domains – BDAT
So let’s talk about architecture domains. Now, the overall enterprise architecture can be divided into four layers or four sub architectures. These are called architecture domains. They are known by the acronym bdat. The reason for bdat is business, Data, application and technology. And like I said, they are the four sub layers or sub architectures of the overall enterprise architecture. The first layer at the top is called the business domain. The business domain deals with the fundamental purpose of the business. Why are you in business? What are you hoping to achieve? This is the business strategy and that should be dictated by the business owners, represented by the executives and the heads of the business units.
The great advantage to enterprise architecture is that it tries to align all of the technical parts of the business to the business architecture. So the business architecture is defined first and the technical architectures, the dat part of bdat, are aligned with that. The data domain deals with the logical and physical data assets. Now, we live in an age where data privacy and how data is handled in an organization is at the top of people’s minds. We have gone through very public challenges with companies like equifax and Facebook, and in 2018, paying particular attention to your data strategy and resources requires your specific attention.
The third domain of this four domains is called the application domain. Now, the data and application domains are very similar in the approach on how you define them. But the application domain deals with how individual applications are developed and deployed and how those applications are related to the core business process. Like I said, everything comes off of the business. And finally, the bottom layer of this cake is called the technology domain. oftentimes the computers, networks, middleware. And those thirdparty applications that a company uses seems like an afterthought, but it’s really the support system of the business.
Now we live in an age where everything is online and everyone is online and self serve portals are the norm. Hackers and attackers are attempting every trick in the book to get into a company’s systems. The growth in spending in the technology domain has often outpaced the other spending in the business. But we also need to be strategic in how the technology domain serves the needs of the business. And so those are the four architecture domains known as bdat. And you.
4. Architecture Development Method – ADM
This is the architecture development method, and I call this the beating heart of the togaf standard Adm is an established process that companies can use to develop their enterprise architecture. It’s been tested and it’s repeatable. Now, the first phase of the atm is called the preliminary phase. This is the phase where we establish your basic principles and set up your architecture capability that will guide you through the task and make decisions easier. Then we’re going to get into the adm cycle. Now, the adm cycle consists of eight phases labeled A through H. Phase A of the cycle takes you through defining a vision for the project, and phases B through D define the architectures of each of the four architecture domains bdat.
Now, once those architectures are defined and all the stakeholders have signed off on it, phases E and F define a process for laying out a roadmap, a work plan, and a series of transition architectures to get you from where you are to where you want to be. And phase G is when you, as an architect, work with the development teams to get the work implemented and to establish the architecture contract. Finally, phase H, which is the last phase of the cycle, deals with that period after the architecture has been implemented. And this is where you handle changes that have to happen and whether or not you’re going to kick off a new adm cycle.
Finally, there’s a center. The cycle itself has a role in the center called requirements management. And it’s just an ongoing phase. As things come, changes are made, you’re going to handle them using a certain process, and that’s in the requirements management process. So at the end of phase H, you’re in phase H for an indeterminate period of time, you’re going to be looking at things that are happening. You’re going to be examining changes in your industry, the new business requirements coming down from the executive team, that’s when you get that question, when should we start this adm cycle all over again?
5. Architecture Work Products – Deliverables, Artifacts and Building Blocks
Talk about the next core concept of toga’s standard, that is artifacts, Deliverables and Building Blocks. As an architect, your work will produce a number of outputs. Now, you are not going to be inventing these output formats as you go, but instead you’ll be creating these artifacts deliverables and building Blocks in accordance with the Architecture Content Framework. The Architecture Content Framework provides a structural model for your architecture content. Now, I mentioned those three terms artifacts, deliverables and building blocks. Let me define them. artifacts are work products that get produced during your architecture work that describe one aspect of the overall architecture.
They are generally classified as lists, matrices and diagrams. Now, each phase of the adm defines a number of standard artifacts. And it’s important for the exam that you have a general sense of what artifact is created during which phase. Now, there’s a lot of them, and I don’t recommend that you try to memorize them. It’s probably better to read through them, understand what they are and what their naming convention is, and then you’ll understand why it is created during which phase. A deliverable is a work product according to the standard that is contractually specified and in turn formally reviewed, agreed, and signed off by the stakeholders.
So a deliverable is basically a complete document, not just a single diagram. And the documents are significant and important enough that they must be reviewed, agreed upon, and signed off by the business owners and other stakeholders. Finally, there’s this concept of building blocks. Now, a building block is basically that you should strive to generalize and reuse as much as you can of your architecture. Now, Togafcont breaks down this concept of building blocks into architecture building blocks and solution building blocks. Architecture building blocks is abbreviated as abbs, and they represent business processes that can be reused between architecture diagrams.
They are named concepts. I’ll show you example in a second. The solution building block is abbreviated as sbb, and they represent the technical solutions that can be reused between architecture diagrams. They are supportive of architecture building blocks. These are implementations, essentially. So let’s look at an example. Let’s say you have an organization and you need a way to look up a customer’s profile. Many different employees in your organization need this capability for many different reasons. The customer lookup function is just a common function that many people need, and you could turn that into an architecture building block.
When you are defining the needs of various parts of the business, you can just copy and paste this customer Lookup ABB into that spot of the diagram or of the requirements. So you’ll know it’s a named thing and you’ll know what you’re talking about when you say customer lookup ABB. Now, behind the scenes, the Customer lookup ABB is actually a crm customer search module. And that is the solution building block. So that crm is the solution to the business concept, which is the ability to look up.
6. Enterprise Continuum
Standard. That is the Enterprise continuum. No, not that kind of continuum. What’s with the Star Trek references, man? Basically, the Enterprise continuum is a way of classifying items in the architecture repository. You’re going to classify them either as extremely generic or extremely specific. Or somewhere in the middle, it’s usually represented as a line. And I’ll show this to you. So on the left you have the extremely generic architectures. And then as you go towards the right, you get to very organization specific architectures. So on the left is what’s called the Foundation Architectures. Now, this is very generic architectures. Usually. The togaf library contains a standard called the trm or Technical Reference Model.
If you ever look at it, it’s extremely generic. It describes a model that applies to a computer, basically, which can apply to almost any company on the planet. It’s extremely generic. I can’t overstate that. So on the left of the Enterprise continuum, those are called Foundation Architectures. Now, as you step one to the right, those are called Common System Architectures. So when you’re dealing with common System architectures, there’s a little bit more definition to the standards that exist there. Now, maybe they’re talking about service oriented architectures or focused on service businesses, but not on product businesses, not on manufacturing.
Maybe they’re dealing with companies that work with the public sector. They’re still quite generic, but you’ll start to recognize that not every standard in this category applies to your company. Another step to the right is what’s called the industry architectures. So if you are a financial firm, there are probably some industry standards, financial standards for how data is passed between firms in your industry. Now, those data standards are not specific to your individual company, but they do apply to all companies in your industry. Or maybe you’re in the education sector and there are educationspecific standards. Those are called industry specific architectures.
And on the rightmost side of the Enterprise continuum is the company and organization specific architectures. These are yours, okay? Generally, they are proprietary. They are specific to your company. You may have taken them from somewhere else and then modified them to your needs, but they are specific to your company. Generally, they’ve been created by you. These are organization specific architectures. Now, in addition to the Enterprise continuum, the Enterprise continuum divides itself into architecture, continuum. And solutions. continuum? Now, given that we just talked about abbs and sbbs, you can probably imagine how that division gets divided. The abbs live along the Architecture continuum, while the spbs live along the solution.
7. Architecture Repository
Called the Architecture Repository, mentioned that a few times already. The Architecture Repository is a central storage where you keep all of your architectural outputs. Trust me, you do not want your C Drive to be the central storage for all your architecture outputs. You could have 500 Microsoft Word files in there and then you’ll have trouble finding or remembering which is the latest version of which particular document. So most enterprises invest in some type of architecture repository system where they can store all of their work of the architecture team. Now, this makes it organized and easy for everyone working on the project and all the stakeholders to find what they need.
This could be as simple as a very well organized file server using folders and naming standards, et cetera. Or you could create an online system or your electronic system such as git, which is used for storing versioned files. Or you can purchase a third party tool like a Knowledge Management Tool or a specific tool for Architecture Repository to store your documents. The togaf Standard does not make any recommendations on how you store these documents. You can choose whichever tool that you want and you will not be tested on the exam on any particular storage method. But the togaf Standard does talk about how you organize these documents and that’s called the Architecture Repository.
So the Architecture Repository contains, there’s a list here of nine items that are in the Architecture Repository. So we’ve got the architecture metamodel. Now, this Architecture metamodel is something that is tailored to your organization. It contains your own version of the Architecture Framework. We haven’t talked about tailoring the toga Framework yet, but when you do that, this is where it’s going to live. The Architecture Capability section are all of the rules around governance of architecture. The Architecture Landscape is something that you might hear throughout the specification and generally represents all of the assets that are currently deployed in your organization.
These are all the systems and all the business processes, et cetera. Then there’s the Standards Information Base that contains all the various standards that are not written by you that your organization needs to keep handy and use when you’re developing your architecture. This could include like privacy standards, like gdpr or healthcare standards like hipaa, et cetera. The Reference Library contains a lot of reference material that you can pull from when you’re building your architecture. So as you’re getting documents and other things that you need, that goes in the Reference Library. That’s not part of your architecture, but it’s part of the documents that went into the reference of the architecture.
Governance Log is exactly how it sounds. It’s a record of your architecture governance activity, which you haven’t talked about governance too much yet. But this is like what changes get requested and whether they were approved or not and the justifications around that meeting minutes, et cetera. There are two new items that are added to the architecture repositories. Part of togaf 9. 21 is called the Architecture Requirements Repository. So that’s where all your approved documents go. You don’t put anything draft in there. This is approved and signed off documents and the solutions. Landscape contains your solution building blocks that’s support the architecture. Landscape. Yes, there’s a lot that goes into the repository. That’s why your C drive would not make a good spot for it. But.
8. Architecture Capability
Standard is called architecture capability. I am so glad that this is not a Star Trek reference. So architecture capability is an evaluation of your ability to do Enterprise architecture. Now, if you’ve never done architecture before, you’re not trained on it, you have no one dedicated to it, you don’t have processes in place, you’re don’t have governance. Quite honestly, your architecture capability might be a zero on a scale of zero to 10. So you might have no capability currently. But if you get trained on it, you take some formal training, you start doing it. You hire someone to do it full time. Someone has experience in it. You put the proper governance in place.
You’ve established your framework that you’re going to follow. Then you’re going to grow, and you’re going to become one, or you’re going to become a two. The more you do it, then the better you get at it. Now, the adm process has what’s called the preliminary phase. And it’s in that phase that you not only establish what your current level of architecture capability is, but you decide what level that you want to be. Now, not everyone needs to be a level ten of architecture capability. You might not have the money for it. And quite frankly, the more process you have, the longer it takes. And process is not always good for every company, right? So you establish what level of architecture capability that you want to get within the preliminary phase.
Now, there’s a challenge to setting that up because you’re going to have to once you decide what level that you want, you’re going to have to go and get the budget, you’re going to have to hire or train. You’re going to have to ensure that all of the top levels of the enterprise are on board with this. Establishing a dedicated architecture group and defining the enterprise architecture for your enterprise. So the capability, it’s a little bit like a sandwich. It sits in the middle, you’ve got governance on the top and you have repository below. So the architecture architecture capability are the people and the processes that establish the architecture.
That architecture goes into the repository and above. The people and the processes that establish architecture is the governance model that sits on top. Establishing that the process runs according to the way you’ve defined it. Now, capability doesn’t stop in the preliminary phase. As you go through phases A through F, the architecture team is the ones that are defining the architectures, working with various leaders within the organization to define the architecture and to put together a plan. Once you get to phase G, you’re going to want to establish what’s called an architecture contract.
The architecture contract is a contract, a written and signed contract between the architecture team and the implementation team, where the implementation team basically agrees to implement the architecture as it’s defined. And you’re going to join the implementation phase. You’re going to monitor the implementations and make sure that what they’re developing and deploying matches your plan. And you can hold them accountable. If they’re going to deviate from the plan or if they’re going to deviate them from the plan, they’re going to have to go to the architecture of governance and get a change request put through, et cetera. So those are the components of the architecture capability.
