Product Description

An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language. Lankhorst and his co-authors present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’, the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues. The modelling language and the other techniques presented have been proven in practice in many real-life case studies. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #415785 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 334 pages

About the Author
Marc Lankhorst has worked with the Telematica Instituut in Enschede, The Netherlands as a researcher on software and enterprise architecture since 1996. He is reponsible for the group of software engineers of the institute and he has managed the ArchiMate project, a co-operation between several partners from industry and academia, concerned with modelling, visualisation and analysis of enterprise architectures. Additionally he teaches courses on architecture at the University of Twente and at Delft University of Technology.

Customer Reviews

Very ambitious volume on integrated Enterprise Architecture modelling, communication and analysis
The books main theme is about how to achieve Business-IT alignment through the use of enterprise architecture. The modelling part is by far the most important part of the book. Here the ArchiMate language is defined, which is an open and independent language for enterprise architecture.

A current problem in enterprise arcitecture is that stakeholders within different architecture domain operates with their own models and that the relationships between the concepts in these models seldom are clear. ArchiMate attempts to remove these ambiguities by creating a unified meta-model of EA across the three architectural domains: Business, Application and Technology.

The model itself is surprisingly simple - and dare I say - elegant. It's safe to say, that ArchiMate takes a service oriented approach to enterprise architecture. It is also worth noting, that ArchiMate is not an attempt to replace specialised modelling languages such as UML or BPMN.

It is also worth noting, that ArchiMate is being adopted by The Open Group (under TOGAF)

The good:

Very ambitious attempt at creating a unified and coherent meta-model for enterprise Aarchitecture. Excels in describing the need for a coherent language as well as describing the ArchiMate language. The book is very scholarly written and there is little if any hype.

The bad:

The level of ambition and the scholary nature of the book make for a very dense read. But not only that - the parts dealing with communication and analysis seems less approachable and less applicable than the modelling part.

Overall:

It's hard not to applaud this attempt at creating a unified and holistic way to model and describe enterprise architectures. One can only hope that initiatives like this will take hold. A dense read for sure - but well worth it.