What is Architecture?

Architecture is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings or any other structures including enterprise or software architectures.

Architecture

“Architecture descriptions are formal descriptions of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structural and behavioral properties of the system and its evolution. They define the components or building blocks that make up the overall system, and provide a plan from which products can be procured, and subsystems developed, that will work together to implement the overall system. It thus enables you to manage your overall IT investment in a way that meets the needs of your business.”

Mission

  • To provide a specialised modelling notation for Enterprise Architecture

  • Addresses the main architectural layers

  • Philosophy is to remain simple, high-level / conceptual and small

Architecting complex systems is a critical task. The description of systems (its architecture) is needed in order to provide maximum support to the Enterprise.

Before ArchiMate, the tools available either present UML or other modeling options. They may be capable of architecting systems, but they have not been designed with that specific purpose in mind.

ArchiMate fills this gap. It is designed to address the key areas of architecture (Business, Applications and Technology), with just sufficient capabilities to describe the architecture at a high-level. Other designers / engineers can then take over with the detailed design.

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