According to Wikipedia, "The ArchiMate® modeling language is an open and independent Enterprise Architecture standard that supports the description, analysis, and visualization of architecture within and across business domains." This article aims to demonstrate the practical power of this language and how it can benefit a company.
Old McDonald had a farm
Most likely, you have heard the popular children’s song “Old MacDonald had a farm”:
“Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.
And on that farm he had a cow, E-I-E-I-O.
With a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there,
Here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo-moo
Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O …”
You are probably wondering what this song has to do with ArchiMate. You will figure this out if you agree with the two statements:
a) ArchiMate is a language to describe businesses.
b) The song is about MacDonald’s business.
Now, let me show you how this can be done.
Starting with the semantics
Let us use the lyrics of the song to produce similar architecture content, something like a model of MacDonald farm. It could be something like this:
It may come as a surprise that many people can understand this model without any explanation. Not only is it easy to figure out, but also ArchiMate is a standard language to describe enterprise architectures including our imaginary MacDonald’s farming business. Old MacDonald had a farm is a fun song, and by translating it, I had my fun, too. I often use this approach for training new team members like asking them to fix some errors and omissions in fun models. However, there is much more to it.
Capturing architecture narrative on the go
With some practice, ArchiMate can be used for architecture “stenography”. Stenography is the practice of writing in shorthand, which is used to transcribe spoken language rapidly. It's commonly employed by those who need to record spoken words quickly and accurately e.g. court clerks or reporters. For architects, capturing their architecture narrative on the go saves a lot of time and reduces the number of cycles during discovery phases. When modeling is done in front of an audience, they may quickly figure out what is going on and start contributing and suggesting on the content being discussed.
ArchiMate modeling is usually done with the use of professional tools that offer Visio-style drawing and other useful capabilities. When a tool is used, it produces not pictures but data representing all the elements of the model and their relationships. Then, the data can be searched, drilled through, and used to produce required views and documents automatically on demand, which also drastically simplifies any discovery sessions and architecture output production.
Holistic Enterprise development
When architecture work is done by multiple contributors in an orchestrated manner, the data collected in the tool’s repository may lead to exponential knowledge accumulation and massive reuse. With the introduction of a consistent and continuous development of a model, which represents the entire organization as a single whole, a company may end up with the organization’s digital blueprint, which is often missing. A blueprint outlines the inner workings of a company and shows how the people, processes, and technology work together to deliver business promise to market.
The availability of a blueprint during the strategy lifecycle as an accurate representation of the current state or proposed future state, provides an opportunity for massive saving of cost and time while reducing so called decision latency, which is one of the leading negative factors influencing the entire industry.
When a blueprint is filled with operational data and additional information, it becomes a DTO (Digital Twin of Organization), which is a full computer replica of a real-world organization. In essence, DTO is data, and it could be good for everything data is good for: performance monitoring, SWOT analysis, impact analysis, options comparison, trend analysis and simulation, M&A projections, etc. The following are just few examples of reports that use data coming from a DTO:
Conversational AI
Finally, the latest advances in GenAI opened another door, - an intelligent human-like user interface. Please meet Annie, a personal AI assistant for managers, executives and other decision-making roles. Annie can provide advice, show the trends, compare the options. With Annie, you may have human-like dialogue over voice or messaging.
This type of user interface is not entirely new, and the only question would be, ‘where this information is coming from?’. The answer is ‘Primarily, from DTO, which is created with ArchiMate’. Therefore, it won’t be too much of exaggeration to say that Annie can speak ArchiMate. There could be multiple AI agents participating in collecting and processing information from various sources, but DTO provides the structure and acts as an information hub.
Conclusions
I started my story with architecture stenography and ended with Conversational AI. It is a natural evolution of the idea of replacing text and illustrations with data resulting from applying formal architecture practices and using industry standards.
This transition can be done with minimal investment within a single project posed as ‘pilot’ and executed in a sandbox environment. Then, after 2-3 following projects the company may start experiencing various positive effects and may expect a break-even point. Importantly, the company would already have its strategy lifecycle cleared of undue information mining and had the necessary foundation ready for digital innovation.
As Annie says, ‘If you have any questions, please follow this!
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