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Creating your own meta-model or using company wide best practices? |
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Sander Rodenhuis
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Sunday, 30 December 2007 |
ArchiMate is being accepted as an enterprise architecture description language by a large amount of Dutch organizations and companies. Because it is a language, you must first learn to write and read (interpret) it. So you attend a course where you learn the basics behind ArchiMate and afterwards you enthusiastically start creating your own models and views. But after a while you will run into a situation where there are probably multiple ways of modeling a specific issue, such as:
- How to model multiple instances of an application component?
- How to model a application infrastructure (with generic software components)?
- How to model message broker usage?
The meta-model behind ArchiMate offers multiple ways for modeling these and models can thereby be interpreted differently. Architecture models are an abstraction of reality and are used to create insight into specific aspects of a system. An architecture model is thereby the basis for common understanding. By using a commonly accepted language we are able to align viewpoints between all the architectural layers (business, application and technology).
When using standard ArchiMate, additional agreements are needed to ensure that everyone speaks the language the same way. Defining additional agreements can be done by creating organization specific extensions to ArchiMate (a custom or organization specific meta-model) or by building upon company wide best practices.
A custom or organization specific meta-model should reuse (inherit) ArchiMate concepts and their interpretation as much as possible. Such a custom meta-model has the advantage that all views can be based upon a single model, and can thereby be used for analysis purposes. An example of such an analysis is creating insight into all business processes that depend on a non standard application (or infrastructure). Do understand that such a meta-model will not immediately be clear to those that only understand "vanilla" ArchiMate. It can even create resistance and tempt architects in the field to find arguments not to adhere to it!
Publishing best practices is a more bottom-up approach, where all users can bring in there own personal experience. Best practices can be openly discussed and this will help in understanding the language (and the acceptance of it) better. You can use your viewpoints to store and manage the best practices.
I personally prefer the more bottom-up approach. It simply takes time learning a new language.
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