The Open Group is uniquely positioned within the IT industry to bring
together the buy side and the supply side to agree on the real
requirements that the industry needs to address, and effective methods
of addressing them. Within the architecture domain, The Open Group has
been active for over a decade, developing and making freely available an
architecture framework and methodology - TOGAF. Developed by The Open
Group Architecture Forum, TOGAF is today accepted and used around the
world as a genuinely open framework and method for enterprise
architecture.
For the first eight years of its existence, The Open Group
Architecture Forum focused primarily on evolving TOGAF as a framework
for developing technical architectures that fully meet the business
needs of an organization. That goal reached maturity with TOGAF Version
7.
As of TOGAF Version 8, the Architecture Forum began to respond to new
challenges, with the increasing realization within the industry of the
importance of Enterprise Architecture in the development of information
systems. IT users are now seeking a framework that helps to develop
enterprise architectures to address all aspects of an organization's
information services. They are also seeking skilled architectural
practitioners and suitable tool sets that will support them.
This tutorial by Chris Greenslade of Frietuna Consultants described
what the Architecture Forum has achieved so far with the development of
TOGAF, and showed how the Forum is responding to the new challenges with
the development of TOGAF 8 "Enterprise Edition" (see slides). Topics
covered included:
- The Architecture Forum
- Our motivation for developing TOGAF
- The TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM)
- Other aspects of TOGAF
- Mapping to the Zachman framework
- Other activities of the Architecture Forum
- Architecture practitioners
- Architecture tools
- Future role of Architecture and the Architecture Forum
