This paper discusses the usage of the ArchiMate language in the viewpoint of achieving consistency in the enterprise architecture, which in turn enables interoperability across the whole organization. ArchiMate language in continuous development. However, its popularity and adoption rate is miles ahead of the mentioned development in form of official releases. Thus, The ArchiMate language is also evolving in multiple shadowy ways parallel to the official one. The described situation presents threats for the effective maintenance of enterprise architecture and in consequence, hinders the decisionmaking process itself. This short paper presents a case study of Czech eGovernment and proposes a way how to achieve viable long-term conformity with the official release and its compliance.
With the increased scope of any of the information system, the complexity of this system also increases. The same applies to any organization. As the organization grows the complexity of it also and probably not linearly increases. As a parallel to managing the complexity of information systems a solution for managing the complexity of organization has emerged – the discipline of enterprise architecture.
This discipline contains of multiple rival frameworks and other tools which tackle
this complexity from different sides
This paper is organized into the following parts: • • • •
This introduction is followed by chapter 2 with more detailed information about ArchiMate.
Chapter 3 reflects on the recent changes to ArchiMate in correspondence to its implication for the modelling process. This chapter also points out the main relevant issues that are still unresolved and hinders ArchiMate usage due to the tailoring.
Chapter 4 is a case study of Czech eGovernment accompanied by discussion and suggested course of action concerning ArchiMate users and ArchiMate development.
The conclusion of this article. 2
The ArchiMate language is meant to ease the process of managing enterprise assets
in order to increase effectiveness of an organization
The ArchiMate language is quite a new language in comparison to the Unified
Modelling language (UML) or the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) which was in
the modern form already published in Chen’s work in 1976
The full ArchiMate language currently breaks down into multiple layers and aspects (core version has only 3 layers and 3 aspects) fig. 1.
The last addition for the ArchiMate language up to this date is release numbered as 3.1 in November 2019. This release replaces version denoted as 3.0.1 from August 2017.
The last release brought a new element, value stream, which brings Porter’s value
chain into ArchiMate. However, the concept of adding exactly this element,
respectively coping with its absence was already proposed and discussed by Caetano
et al.
The ArchiMate language like TOGAF is built to be changed, further developed.
This process is usually called tailoring
The expected addition of security aspect was not added and so the security is mainly
tailored and is still causing active discussion
Although Czech eGovernment did not adopt TOGAF and ArchiMate fully, the
framework that it uses is mainly based on those two. Czechia made its own framework
and changed up the content of ArchiMate language, some features of ArchiMate has
been restricted, e.g. elements but new features have been added for example
stereotypes. The Czech architecture framework (National Architectural Framework,
abbreviated NAR) is maintained by the Office of the Chief eGovernment Architect of
the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic
Overall those changes could be justified as a proposition to bring all those
organizations participating in Czech eGovernment up to speed and as discussed by
AlKharusi et al.
In order to cope with change a conceptual model of the proposed application for Czech eGovernment is proposed fig. 2. The proposal and solution are using the Model repository application which is currently being tested. The analytics application would be then built to use a graph database to perform analytics on tailored and base ArchiMate models. The mechanism of how to cope with possible changes and inconsistencies as the ArchiMate and tailored models mature is as follows: • By access to model source code (which represents the model and is machinereadable), a stripped standardized model will be made. • The previous step achieves consistency with future ArchiMate releases. • The stripped model could be saved as a differential file, with indexed changes that mean the whole tailored model could be recreated.
This paper presented the ArchiMate language in view of recent changes and issues which are still present in utilizing the ArchiMate language. The principle of tailoring for the perspective of ArchiMate was discussed. Then a case study of Czech eGovernment is presented. Due to the tailoring process, the approach of versioning and architecture model source code manipulation is presented via the conceptual model. Given the fact that ArchiMate models could be exported and used in the form of a machine-readable file, this function could be fully automated. However, this approach has drawbacks as it is generally “doubling” the number of models – one tailored and one ArchiMate base specification ready (the data usage is not doubled as only the difference between the two models must be kept). On the other hand, adding new information to the ArchiMate base model could be then cross-referenced to the original one and so it accelerates the modeling process.